Alexander Shelley finds inspiration in his work with young musicians

After a conversation with Alexander Shelley, it’s easy to understand why he was invited to guest-conduct the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. The 45-year-old British conductor, set to make his Civic debut on Feb. 10, has demonstrated a commitment to mentorship and community engagement throughout his career — values that closely align with the mission of the Civic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s training ensemble for young professional musicians.

The son of concert pianists Howard Shelley and Hilary Macnamara, Shelley moved from the United Kingdom to Germany in his late teens to study the cello and conducting. In 2005, he won first prize at the Leeds Conductors’ Competition, and at the age of 29, he became the youngest-ever chief conductor of the Nürnberger Symphoniker, a position he held for eight years.

Today, he serves as music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, Canada; principal associate conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and music and artistic director at Artis—Naples in Florida, where he leads the Naples Philharmonic. In the 2026/27 season, he will begin a new post as artistic and music director of the Pacific Symphony in Orange County, California.

Despite his demanding schedule, Shelley aims to prioritize opportunities to work with young people, whether in youth orchestras, early professional ensembles or community-based programs for children who have limited access to the arts.

“I have myriad stories from my experiences working in schools and communities over the years and working with young professionals and kids who are just about to go into college. I find it inspiring,” said Shelley in a recent interview. “I know that there are many things in life that can help young people evolve; the arts are not by any means the only domain. I think what it takes is people taking young people seriously.”

One example is Shelley’s decade-plus relationship with the National Youth Orchestra of Germany, with which he has toured in Canada, Europe and Africa. Rehearsing and performing with these dedicated musicians, who range in age from 15 to 18, is “some of the most rewarding work I can think of,” he said.

He feels the same way about the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s mentorship program, which pairs each member of the orchestra with an early-career musician in their 20s or 30s. Shelley also works with two younger conductors as part of the program.

“In each of these cases, even though they’re slightly different [age] brackets, what I notice is that there is a thirst to refine the skills that need to be brought to bear when you’re an orchestral musician,” he said of these experiences in Germany and Canada. “It is such a unique ecosystem, and one of the things I love talking about with audiences and musicians alike is that an orchestra, when it’s functioning, is one of the most inspiring examples of human collaboration that exists.”

In addition to his work with up-and-coming musicians, Shelley enjoys investing time in young people who haven’t had much exposure to classical music. He was the founding artistic director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen’s Future Lab, a program that uses music to promote individual development and build self-confidence among disadvantaged youth in Germany.

Future Lab’s flagship initiative is an annual opera production developed and performed by students from a local school, with the help of professional musicians, actors, designers and community volunteers. Depending on their area of interest, the young participants may choose to act onstage, compose music, work in the tech department, create costumes, design sets or get involved in some other aspect of the production.

Shelley shared one memory from the project that greatly moved him. During a session with an acting coach, students were asked to pair up with a partner and look each other in the eyes for 60 seconds without speaking. One boy was so averse to the exercise that he got “aggressively angry,” Shelley recalled. “I realized in that moment there is nothing more revealing than just looking at someone in the eye. Any insecurities that were in these young people, in this simple act, bubbled to the surface.”

“And then, over the course of the following months, that particular young man who had reacted so badly evolved into a key player in the opera,” he said. “I watched how he was helped on his journey to harness this thing inside him, to be able to channel it and use it onstage. That moment was a pivotal moment in that boy’s life. It turned into an upward trajectory. He went to university; his life turned around.”

Looking ahead to his first-ever visit to Chicago, Shelley is excited to work with the young professionals of the Civic Orchestra. He will conduct an all-French program that opens with D’un matin de printemps by Lili Boulanger, a piece that the Parisian prodigy composed shortly before her death at the age of 24. Next on the program is Debussy’s famous seascape, La mer.

While musicians and audience members will likely be familiar with the first two works, the final piece presents something new: a version of Ravel’s Piano Trio orchestrated by French conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier, who is “like an uncle” to Shelley. In fact, Shelley is the only person besides Tortelier who conducts the piece. “He continues to refine the instrumentation, so the version that we’ll be hearing in Chicago is the latest version of this brilliant orchestration,” he said.

Shelley feels that this program is tailor-made to develop the ensemble skills that are core to Civic’s training. “Each of the pieces on the program demand very, very skillful orchestral playing — not just instrumental, individual [playing], but the balancing of the orchestra, the articulation. These are pieces where you can go into endless refinement … and I think that that’s going to be an enormous amount of fun to work on,” he said.

“If we’re thinking about this, not just as a performance, but as a way station on a journey to a later part of your life in the industry as a musician, this is a great program for training those skills,” Shelley said. With a conductor who knows how to fine-tune an ensemble of this caliber, it certainly seems like the members of the Civic Orchestra are in for a rich experience.