Alexander Shelley set to serve up ‘Scheherazade’ with Pacific Symphony

Some might view orchestral conductors as manifestations of power as they stand on podiums in front of dozens of musicians, directing with their hands and arms and gaining sensational sounds in response to their motions.

Alexander Shelley, tapped as the successor to Carl St.Clair to lead the Pacific Symphony, made that suggestion during an interview preceding the orchestra’s shows this week.

To conduct, however, is to serve, Shelley said. He feels a deep responsibility as a caretaker for the creative works that he helps bring to an audience within a concert hall. Composers — both alive and deceased — are his idols, and he sees himself as an interpreter.

“My job is to get inside the craft of what they’ve created, inside their imaginations, and to bring it to life with every fiber of my being, with absolute conviction,” he said. “We’re the conduit. We’re the tool in between the mind of a composer, who’s totally attuned to their sonic perception of the world and how they can manifest it in sound, and the audience, so that role of service is an unbelievably exciting one.”

Shelley, artistic and music director designate for Pacific Symphony, is back in town this week for one of four programs he plans to preside over during this transitional period.

Beginning Thursday and continuing through Saturday, three shows will be headlined by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” The concerts will also feature contemporary musical selections — Jessie Montgomery’s “Starburst” and Mexican composer Arturo Márquez’s guitar concerto “Mystical and Profane.”

The performances will begin at 8 o’clock each night at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. A matinee performance of “Scheherazade” itself is scheduled for 3 p.m. on Sunday.

“‘Scheherazade’ is as good a piece as I can think of to show off an orchestra,” said Shelley, who is in the final season of an 11-year tenure as music director of Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. “Not only do they play this unbelievably beautiful and exciting music, the whole thing is just like being inside a fairy tale, as a big, collective symphony orchestra.

“Pretty much every one of the solo positions in the orchestra is featured. … For me, it brings together both this extremely accessible, extremely beautiful and exciting music that sounds almost like a film score.”

The Márquez guitar concerto was written for Pablo Sainz-Villegas, a piece co-commissioned by the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Artis — Naples in Florida, where Shelley has also served as artistic and music director since the 2024-25 season.

Much like any singular performance, where Shelley said one or two audible mistakes makes for a bad evening, his view of the profession is aspirational. Building a long-term arc of development with a group, he said, is the height of fulfillment in the life of a conductor.

“That marriage of individual responsibility and then responsibility of the collective is, I like to say, a microcosm of exactly what we aspire to in society, which is that everybody’s empowered to be their absolute best self,” Shelley said. “In fact, it’s required of everybody that they invest the work in themselves in order to then put it at the service of the collective, because the essence of an orchestra is it means nothing if you’re great unless you listen to other people and communicate with them.”