Conducting symphony orchestras is an odd existence: Dozens of musicians on a stage, and the one they’re all watching doesn’t make a sound. That’s the conductor, guiding the others in tempo, tone and phrasing through vast compositions that sometimes last an hour. When the conductor also selects repertoire, leads hiring, and guides the whole organization’s musical philosophy, he’s called the music director. Alexander Shelley has been the music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa for 11 years. Last week he conducted his last two subscription-season concerts in that role. On the program: Mahler’s monumental Second Symphony.1 Shelley will be back on July 1 and 2 to conduct two more concerts, and then we’ll see him less often in Canada.2
He’s 46. I volunteered on the search committee that selected him for the role in 2013. I’ve been well satisfied with our choice ever since, though the rest of the committee didn’t need me to tell them this guy was a keeper. Shelley is a charming Brit, focussed and productive in rehearsal, persuasive with donors, fun at parties, an eloquent speaker who loves to explain what orchestras do. Early in his first season as music director, the orchestra’s audiences became a lot younger and noticeably more diverse. Under his leadership, the orchestra has commissioned and premiered more than 50 new compositions. They’ve recorded all the symphonies of Brahms and Schumann, along with the underappreciated composer Clara Schumann, who was Robert Schumann’s wife and at least Johannes Brahms’s close friend.
He’s a dynamite Beethoven conductor, brisk and never pompous. I began by asking him about something that happened in January. Shelley was conducting Beethoven’s Third Symphony, called the Eroica (“Heroic”) because of Beethoven’s complicated feelings about Napoleon. It usually ends at race-horse tempo. Shelley took one section at the tempo that Beethoven actually marked in the score, which is half as fast as it’s usually played. As far as he can tell, conductors today simply never make that choice. Because Shelley followed Beethoven’s tempo marking, the finale felt like Beethoven’s hero was an ocean liner pulling into port. Dramatic, but in a different way. Since conducting is all about choices, I started there.
This interview has been edited, sometimes aggressively, for length and clarity. It also has footnotes, a capability the Substack platform provides that I never thought I’d need. Until now.
Paul Wells: Let’s jump into the geeky deep end. What did you do in the finale of the Beethoven Third Symphony? It was a tempo indication…
Alexander Shelley: I am very passionate about starting with the information the composer gives us. That sounds like a really obvious thing to say, but if one understands the ecosystem of music generally, and I think just humans, we very often start with what we’ve heard, and first felt, rather than what the original text is.
There’s any number of quotes that are attributed to Shakespeare or to Oscar Wilde or whatever that are actually halfway right, or they’re taken so badly out of context that they end up meaning something completely different, but then they become the standard. “Oh, you know, that’s Shakespeare” or “That’s Oscar Wilde.” But oftentimes when you go to the text, the original source is sometimes wildly different.
New music is the easiest thing in the world because you’re the first person to do it. So you just take the score, and you do what’s written. With older music, and particularly, let’s call them museum pieces — works that people revere – one tends to perform them, and look at the score, having inherited lots of traditions through recordings over your lifetime. This is where music and interpretation moves into the world of, let’s say, political and ideological beliefs. People find it very hard, if they believe that something should be a certain way, to let go of it.
At the end of the Eroica, there’s this question. Beethoven gives us, on one hand, a remarkably slow speed on the metronome. On the other hand, a really practical one. Traditionally it’s been done at double the speed he asked for, because somehow it feels more heroic. But I think the interesting challenge is to say, “Huh. So he asked for that speed at the metronome mark. How does that fit with my notion of the heroic?” Because technically it makes a lot of sense. The strings are playing all ya-ga-da-ga-da-ga-da — these double notes, triple, quadruple notes.. But in that speed that he asks for, you can actually play it. And in the other speed, the double speed, they just have to fake it all the way through. So it’s never been an elegant solution.
I was remarking to Henry3 that even great conductors who’ve done unbelievable amounts to shift attitudes in such areas, like John Eliot Gardiner, even he shied away from that particular choice. And I said to Henry, “F— it, I’m just tired of it. I’m just gonna do it. I’m going to make us believe in it, you know, and just see what it feels like.” And I love it. I think it’s amazing.
You know, it’s an avatar for a broader picture. I’m doing the same thing in the Mahler. I’ve been through every source you can find, and I don’t understand why certain traditions have accumulated. People will say, “Listen to those early recordings.” I have, and they’re all different. The people who studied with Mahler — they all do it differently.
PW: Now the valedictory question. This is your 11th season with NACO, but it’s 13 or 14 years since you began the relationship.
Shelley: Yeah, if not longer.
PW: Do you feel older?
Shelley: Oh yeah, I’m older. I was saying to my wife, the other day, it’s official now: to look behind me, I have to turn my entire torso. My internal workings, I’m like a mid-20-year-old. I love activity and motion. I love being very full in life and very engaged. I love love. I love food and drink, and at the same time I love trying to be balanced in all of it. Because otherwise you get f—ed up. I love feeling older. Every year that goes by, I enjoy life more and more, and I already loved life.
But becoming a father4 has been transformative. I didn’t realize all the things that I didn’t feel or know before I had children. Sounds like such a dickish thing to say. I always hated it when people said, “One day, when you’re a parent, you’ll understand.” Phases of life each have their important meaning, and I miss certain aspects of not being a parent. The freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. The deep values that being a parent imparts and — this is such a cliché — but a thing outside of yourself being more important than you.
The most fundamental way that that’s been transformative for me is that I feel it in my music. I don’t know if it’s changed the way I make music. The finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony has always touched me profoundly. But the thing I connect to most readily, and I said this to the chorus the other day, when they first sing Auferstehen5 and it’s whispered, I said, “You know, you’ll all have your own vision of what your greatest moment of fragility would be and meaning. For me, it would be looking at my child sleeping and realizing that I’m no longer there for them, that I’m a spirit, visiting. And the knowledge that they’re about to lead a life in which I’m no longer present.”
I’m definitely older. I don’t know if any wiser, I feel like I am. I feel like I’ve experienced lots of amazing and wonderful and challenging things. Pick any decade, but this has been a tough decade.
PW: Yeah, it’ll hit you like a two-by-four, everything that can happen in that amount of time.
How has this orchestra changed?
Shelley: I find it difficult to be the judge of that. You know, people have asked me what my effect has been on this. I know what I have tried to do in every performance. I know what I think we need to try and achieve every time we go on stage. But how the orchestra has changed? I can talk about personnel, you know, we’ve had a big turnover of personnel. We’ve lost some dear members of the orchestra over the last decade. We’ve gained incredible colleagues and we’ve made wonderful hires. A transition, such as Christopher [Millard] on the bassoon leaving, and Darren [Hicks] coming in, and it felt like a lineage somehow. The sound production, the way of making music. That’s happened in some areas. But I would just leave it to others to describe how the orchestra has changed. If I may.
PW: I’ll bite. They feel more fulfilled. They felt like they had stuff to show that they weren’t getting to show more than a decade ago. Now they have room to indulge all their interests. Your take on the standard repertoire is broader. There’s so much new stuff. Even the programming of concerts, it’s a lot less overture-concerto-symphony, you know.
Shelley: It’s funny, a member of the team — Gregg, who does social media — he was doing an interview with me yesterday for the on-demand version of this Mahler. And off camera, so to speak, he was saying that apparently there’s a gentleman on Twitter who always gets really upset when we do things like Mahler. I haven’t seen it because I don’t go on Twitter because it’s just full of hate and angry people. But the guy blames me, apparently, for shifting what this orchestra was, which was this great chamber orchestra. And I found that very interesting.
Firstly, it’s a terrible reality of today’s world that conversations are defined by the outliers on the bell curve, and it’s just these shouty people over here, and these shouty people over here, who are exceptions rather than rules. But I’ll bite. Part of the issue I have with that is that I inherited an orchestra that had a full low-brass complement, harp, four horns and percussion.6
Now, it was only with Mozart symphonies that clarinets were introduced into the orchestra, let alone low brass, four horns, percussion, harp. So, I inherited an orchestra where I also had an obligation to say, “This isn’t just a chamber orchestra that’s set up for Haydn and Bach. It’s set up for Mozart and beyond.” And I think that’s entirely appropriate for serving a national capital. I think it’s a lazy assumption that by broadening the repertoire, you become less good at any of it. Which is just simply not true. An audience member saying, “I like certain things, therefore, the orchestra should what I like all the time,” also feels lacking in generosity. There might be lots and lots of people in the community who would love to hear Beethoven and Bruckner and Nicole Lizée and Mahler and Strauss, as well as Haydn and Bach. So I was a little bit surprised by, let’s say the intensity of feeling with such things.
PW: Part of it is that people today, nearly 20 years into having smartphones, feel like they should be able to curate anything. It’s occurred to me a couple times at various concerts, yours and others’, that it’s an odd bargain that we’re making — you’re putting yourself in the hands of 60 musicians for the night. You know, you get your hat back at the end of the night, but in the meantime, you don’t actually get to control anything.
Shelley: So what do you get to control in life, Paul? Do you choose where you’re born?
PW: I control who I follow on Instagram.
Shelley: But do you? Because the vast majority of people on Instagram won’t appear on your algorithm ever.
PW: I think the reason I still come out to concerts — there’s a million reasons, but one of them is, I think it’s healthy. It’s a trust exercise: you fall back into someone else’s hands.
Shelley: But that’s what I’m getting at. Either one is going to be somebody who will have their face up to the window of life, or you can step back and say, “Listen, almost everything about existence is circumstance. It’s coincidence. Almost everything about it. This veneer of control is just that.” On one hand, being a nihilist and saying, “Oh then, f—- it, I’m just going to do whatever I want” is, of course, absurd too. But for me, I’m going to act as if I have agency. I’m going to act as if I can define my own future — but I’m also going to try and find the distance to let go. There’s such enormous beauty in accepting that things will come across my path that I have no control over.
I agree with your framing of it: People are used to having this and this and this, and they want that and that. But even these assertion that “I want to curate everything” is — you’re not really curating anyway, because the algorithm is giving you almost everything that you think you’re curating.
A tiny, tiny, fleeting number of people actually make any effort to truly step outside the things that they’re comfortable with. I sound like some kind of anarchist or something. But I do think it’s very important to accept that. And then to say the curatorial part of what’s happening, in terms of putting things on stage, is actually the least interesting or important thing. The most interesting, important thing, I think, is to come into a space and say — whether it’s a night with Paul Wells, whether it’s Mahler’s Second Symphony, or there’s something else — to come in and say, “You know what? I have no idea what’s about to happen or what the conversation is going to be about. Or where this music is going to lead me. Who the musicians are going to be who Paul loves and puts on stage. But with an open mind, and an open heart, I’m going to engage in an adventure.” And that is incredibly valuable. Let’s not pretend that we truly control what’s going on in life. Let’s actually embrace the opportunity we have as never before.
That’s why you’ve got people who listen to four-hour podcasts and watch 12 episodes of Netflix back-to-back. There’s no fear of long form whatsoever. They’ll read your articles, they’ll listen to your podcasts, and they’ll come to your shows. And they’ll be open and interested. It’s just a belief in the content. When I perform a new piece by Nicole Lizée, it’s my job to work really hard to try and get inside it as far as I can. And then to advocate for it. And if advocating means saying from the stage, “It’s going to be f—ing weird. The next half an hour is just going to be weird, but incredible, and she’s a brilliant mind. You won’t have heard anything like this,” it’s already a framing.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. The USP [unique selling proposition] of live is that we let go. We let go and allow the moment to be real, rather than trying to control it.
I need more coffee.
PW: The next stage of your career is going to be kind of tripedal, right?
Shelley: That’s a nice way of putting it.
PW: You’ve got Naples Philharmonic, Pacific Symphony, and National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland —
Shelley: National Symphony Orchestra Ireland.7 There’s no “of.” It’s a bit of marketing.
PW: When we launched the National Post, the owner and the editor were adamant that you must not call it The National Post. It was just, “It’s National Post.”
Shelley: I was having this conversation with my dad the other day, and he was getting really worked up about it. He says “All these orchestras are dropping the ‘The.’ So I have to say, ‘I’m going to London Mozart Players tonight.’”
PW: This sort of jet-setting existence, essentially splitting your year up into quarters — family is a quarter, and then the three orchestras are the other quarters, or whatever the ratio is — Why not just work all year with one orchestra? What do you gain? What do they gain? Why is that the plan for the next little bit?
Shelley: “They” being the orchestras? And my family, I suppose? This is something that people sometimes miss in the equation. Almost any orchestra you can name asks their music director contractually to do a maximum of 12 weeks [per year]. It’s very important that there’s turnover of other conductors, other personalities on stage. It’s healthy for the orchestra, it’s healthy for an audience. In Naples, with the Naples Philharmonic, we have a truncated season because of the nature of the community. You know, it’s a community that really only fills up at the end of October, beginning of November. And everyone’s gone by the end of May. So we truncate our season. The whole of September, the orchestra plays 45-50 concerts for kids. So I do seven, eight weeks there. I do 12 weeks in Pacific Symphony, which takes over the footprint of NACO, and I do seven projects of four to five days with National Symphony Orchestra Ireland. In Dublin, we’ll go to Cork, Galway, we’ll record.
But when I was just in Nuremberg [his first music-director job from 2009-2017], those equivalent weeks, I was traveling all over the world as a guest conductor. So the number of weeks traveling and performing is identical, and the only thing that’s changed in my life is less guest conducting. So, actually, what looks like a picture of becoming diffuse is a picture of me becoming more focused.
I might have gone to Pacific Symphony once every five years, but now I’m doing 12 weeks with them. I’m doing the eight weeks in Naples. I’m doing this seven, eight weeks with Dublin — as a choice. To actually focus in on those orchestras rather than spending what would have been 20 or so weeks just around the world, different orchestras, one-offs, every few seasons come back to the same place. So actually it’s an expression of focus. For me personally, at this stage of my life and my career, what interests me most is the long arc of building things.
You know, I work — as a lot of people do — but I wake up at eight, I don’t have breakfast, and I stop work at like 11 p.m. I just work all day long. I love working. I love planning. I love writing emails. I love thinking, I love reading around it. I love studying scores, I love rehearsing, doing interviews, I love doing marketing and social media and everything I can. Because I feel unbelievably fortunate and grateful that I get to have, on one hand, this experience of entering into symbiosis with extraordinary people every day for several hours. Which is what conducting means. It’s what performing is. It is so hard to describe what an extraordinary human gift that is, and how that fills up the soul and the mind.
And at the same time it also demands of you that you are entirely present. Alert, awake, prepared, ready. Because the responsibility is enormous as well, to these people who have been doing it for so long. So, it’s life — as I see it; other people have their own ways of living — but it’s life, as I see it at, its most vibrant and its most awake. And to have that at the core of what I do, I realize it’s an unbelievable gift. To then have, the next layer of the onion, the gift of saying, I get — here; in Nuremberg; in Orange County; in Naples; in Dublin — to be part of telling the story of, “Why symphonic music?” Sharing that passion. Charting a course for the orchestra. Hiring members. Thinking about our repertoire. Thinking about how we communicate what we do, both externally and internally. To be able to have that as the next layer is extraordinarily meaningful to me. And much more meaningful than guest conducting, which I’ve done for 25 years, and I love, but it’s a much more narrow undertaking.
PW: You’re doing Nixon in China,8 a short drive from the Nixon Presidential Library. That’s got to be unbelievably resonant. And probably something new for that orchestra.
Shelley: They haven’t done Nixon in China before, but they do an opera every year. That is traditionally a traditional opera. Puccini, Verdi, a lot of Italian stuff, some Germans as well. So this is a departure. But our season is celebrating US 250 [the 250th anniversary of Independence]. For all these reasons, including the fact that Nixon was from Orange County, it is the right piece to do. The parallels with now, this question of great power relationships, different perspectives on the world, how and whether to bridge that through politics and personalities — it’s always going to be current, right?
It wasn’t a given for the orchestra. Ticket sales are very important down there. In the initial conversations they were saying, “Well, you know…” You just worry that our traditional opera audience might be fearful of it. But we’re going to work hard to generate awareness.
PW: The political fault lines that you’re navigating have to be something that you’re aware of all the time. The Naples gig, I’m sure it would not even have been on your radar if it weren’t for some Canadian snowbirds — who may or may not now be going to Florida as often as before. What considerations do you have in mind when you’re thinking about that sort of stuff? About, basically, Trump’s world. And I’ll put this much of a finer point on it: I think you’ve been sometimes bemused by the visceral reaction that Canadians have to the needling from Trump-land. And now, you’re going to be spending more time in the middle of all that.
Shelley: You and I have discussed this before. I’m, by temperament, and also led by my temperament through persuasion, a person who, whether I’m speaking to an ultra-progressive or an ultra-conservative, I try to see what it is in what they’re saying that I can learn from. Rather than being needled by it. And it’s not always easy on either side. There have been times I’ve been in Canada, and there have been things that have been asserted and said, where I thought, “I find it difficult to get on board with that.” And there’s plenty that’s said elsewhere in the world where I find it difficult to get on board with. However, maybe it’s having spent 20 years in Germany, but I think, if you see anybody on any branch of the political spectrum asserting something, and it’s something you disagree with — but you see momentum building behind them — then the more important thing to do than to be angry with them or call them demons is to say, “How could it be that there’s momentum behind that perspective?” That interests me far more.
When I’m with people in Orange County, in Dublin, in Ottawa, and in Naples, They don’t sit around throwing darts at pictures of politicians, and they don’t walk into a room and start screaming at each other. They talk about the things that most humans talk about. Which is family and community. Work and art. And, you know, sports. If one perceives the world through the prism of politics, division and anger, then that’s all you see around. If you enter the world with a completely different lens, just don’t encounter it as much. And you don’t have to spend your whole time arguing with people
If you put on a song about love and tenderness when you’re feeling violent, you will, at the end of that song, feel less violent. Maybe a psychopath or sociopath won’t. But I’ve never had an experience where you go into a concert hall, you play something genuinely calming and beautiful, and you don’t turn around, look at the audience, and you see, they’ve shifted. They’re breathing differently. And it’s been measured. So if we can agree that decision-making is not governed by reason alone, but rather reason tends to be created as a scaffolding around what we’ve already decided, then music genuinely has the power to change the world. Because you get 2,000 people in a hall; you give them reason to believe in something greater than all of us, and in human capacity for hope and optimism; and then you release them out into the world — whether it’s for 10 minutes or 10 hours or 10 days, the world will be just a little bit better. I honestly believe that.
NACO is usually fairly small as modern orchestras go. Too small for Mahler, who wrote for more than 100 instrumentalists plus choir. But for two weeks at the end of every season, the orchestra bulks up by adding 40 early-career young professionals for its main educational effort, the Orchestra Mentorship Program. I wrote about that in this post two years ago.
But not never. He’ll be back in June 2027 to run the Mentorship Program and conduct two programs, including Mahler’s Third Symphony.
Henry Kennedy, NACO’s Resident Conductor, a 29-year-old Nova Scotia-born conductor who assists Shelley in rehearsal and conducts some concerts. He also helps Shelley by geeking out over this sort of thing with him.
Shelley has two sons, 7 and 5, born in Ottawa, with his wife Zoe.
“Rise again,” the first word the chorus sings in the symphony’s final movement. Hence the Second Symphony’s nickname, “Resurrection.”
In other words, you can’t complain that NACO is supposed to be a proper little orchestra that should stick to symphonic repertoire from before about 1800, because it has musicians on staff whose instruments usually appear in later music and larger orchestras.
What these three orchestras have in common is that they offer significant opportunity for a builder like Shelley. The two US orchestras are young-ish, formed around 1980. They have fine musicians in excellent halls, surrounded by potential philanthropic donors with real money. They also have average winter temperatures 25°C higher than Ottawa and beaches within 10 minutes’ drive.
Composer John Adams’ first opera, from 1987, about President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to Mao’s China. It begins with a handshake on the tarmac next to Air Force One and ends with an insomniac Chou En-Lai asking the universal question tormenting aging politicians, “How much of what we did was good?”
Brilliant and engaging observations from a most articulate and ambitious musical and arts community builder! Great interview, Paul!
What an extraordinary mind.