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CSOradio
British conductor Alexander Shelley is a maestro on the move. He serves as music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, Canada, and as principal associate conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2023, he was named music and artistic director at Artis—Naples in Florida, leading the Naples Philharmonic.
Last month, Shelley, 45, was appointed as artistic and music director of the Pacific Symphony, based in Orange County, California. He will succeed Carl St. Clair in 2026-27 and then become just the third music director of this orchestra, founded in 1978.
Shelley, who will lead the Civic Orchestra of Chicago on Feb. 10 at Symphony Center, was the youngest-ever chief conductor of Germany’s Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, a position that he held for eight seasons until 2017. He was also the founding artistic director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen’s Future Lab, a program that uses music and art to help disadvantaged youth in Germany.
Speaking of St. Clair, who held the Pacific Symphony post for 35 years, Shelley told the Orange County Register: "This man has built such secure foundations for this organization — such secure foundations within the community. We’ve had this leader for 35 years who’s done an exquisite job.”
“How can you find ways to connect with their lives that adds value to their lives?” he said. “I wouldn’t do this job if I weren’t a deep believer in the profound importance and value of the arts to enrich life, to offer perspectives, and opportunities to feel very deeply things that aren’t part of the every day. It seems to me that whether it’s a visit to an art gallery, whether you go to a reading at a bookstore, whether you listen to a symphony — these are little islands through life where you can go and be intensely focused on something that’s new and different.
"[The arts] act as a wonderful distraction, and it can enrich you, and it can stay with you, and it can realign your entire perspective.”
