Pacific Symphony Debuts Bold New Era Under Shelley
/By Truman C. Wang
5/2/2025
Photo credit: Pacific Symphony
Last evening, May 1, was Alexander Shelley's inaugural concert as Music Director Designate of the Pacific Symphony. He will officially take over in the 2026/27 season and Carl St. Clair, the Symphony’s MD of 35 years, will become its Music Director Emeritus.
The name Shelley may not be familiar to most yet (I know him mainly as the son of famed pianist Howard Shelley, whose survey of Liszt’s complete piano works features prominently in my CD collection.) The new maestro, born in the U.K., trained and worked in Germany and Canada, is a tall, lanky, commanding figure on the podium wielding a baton, and a passionate speaker on the music he is programming.
Pacific symphony and southern california children’s chorus in tan dun’s “jubilant fanfare”
The gala evening opened with Tan Dun's jubilant fanfare from "Heaven Earth Mankind," where Shelley immediately established his precise, energetic conducting style. The orchestra responded with vitality, particularly in the percussion section and contribution from Principal Cellist Warren Hagerty. The Southern California Children’s Chorus, perched above the stage, were musical, rambunctious, and utterly delightful.
Equally exuberant was the next work, Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto. George Li, the 29-year-old Chinese-American soloist, was the right man for the job, bringing to his reading youthful vigor and bristling virtuosity, tempered with poetic sensibility. In the first movement’s lyrical second subject, Li’s supple phrasing and silken legato blended lovingly in a dialog with the woodwinds. The orchestral playing, in a word, was sublime. The gently shimmering, singing tone of the strings in the beginning of Adagio was a sound I had never heard from this orchestra. The horns were mellow and not overpowering, and the woodwinds perfectly homogeneous. Maestro Shelley was clearly working his magic here, creating a mesmerizing new ‘Pacific Symphony sound’. For encore, Li played a crowd-pleasing bonbon La Campanella by Franz Liszt to dazzling effects.
pianist george li
After intermission, Iman Habibi's "Jeder Baum spricht", scored for the same instruments as Beethoven’s Fifth, served as a contemporary response to Beethoven's love of nature (and a warning of climate change). It ends in the same key of c-minor that Beethoven’s Fifth starts in, therefore it was understandable, though still shocking, to hear Habibi’s work run straight on into Beethoven without pause.
When Mendelssohn played the first part of Beethoven’s Fifth to Goethe in 1930, the old man said, “This arouses no emotion but astonishment. It is grandiose.” After a long pause, he added, “It makes one fear the house may fall down.” Shelley’s searing performance of the Fifth aroused big emotion in me and did bring down the house. It’s a celebrated composition, well-executed in its journey from darkness to light, and heralds a shiny, bold new era for the Pacific Symphony.
The concert will be repated on May 2 and 3.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.