A SEPTEMBER SYMPHONY
It will be very busy month for Shelley
Between next month’s Beethoven Festival and becoming a new father, NAC Orchestra musical director Alexander Shelley is going to be seriously double-booked.
Shelley, 38, and his wife Zoe, 29, are expecting their first child, a boy. Zoe is 37 weeks pregnant and labour induction is scheduled to take place Monday.
Two-and-a-half weeks later, on Sept. 13, the orchestra launches its 2018/19 season with a 10-day festival of Beethoven’s music that involves Shelley conducting the orchestra during a series of four concerts that will cumulatively present all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies.
When Shelley was interviewed this week, before the decision to induce was determined, he kidded about this dizzying confluence of his career and personal life. “The first question I get is if we’re going to call him Ludwig, and the answer is no,” Shelley said.
The usual preparations have been made for the baby’s arrival, he continued. “We’re kitted out. We have the crib and we have the pram and we’ve got lots of little baby clothes and diapers and everything that we’re going to need. And now we just need a little portion of good luck so that everything goes well.”
The baby ’s due date was Sept. 10, which would have been smack in the middle of NACO’s rehearsals. The NAC had a contingency plan in case Shelley had to put family first, and hired Tania Miller, a renowned Canadian conductor, to be in Ottawa on standby.
The expecting parents met more than a decade ago, when Shelley was conducting the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, his homeland, and Zoe was a teenage cellist. A chemistry grad, Zoe is now a personal trainer and fitness model who was an extra in last year’s Wonder Woman movie.
When Alexander came on board as the NAC Orchestra’s new maestro in the fall of 2015, Zoe was still based in London, and they were trying to work out how to share their lives.
It seems that Shelley, in the blush and exhaustion of new fatherhood, will be able to look forward to presenting all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies during the festival’s run, offering listeners what he called a “bucket list” experience.
Shelley said there are multiple reasons for making NACO’s performances of the symphonies the spine of the festival.
One factor, he said, was the recent renovation of Southam Hall, which this summer was outfitted with a new orchestral shell. New woods and materials will change the acoustics in the hall for both audience and performers, and Shelley thought that presenting Beethoven’s symphonies, which many NACO regulars will know fairly well, would allow for some interesting before-and-after comparisons to be made with respect to the acoustics.
In their own right, the symphonies are “one of the focal points of any orchestra’s repertoire, something you continually need to revisit and refresh and refine,” Shelley added.
He said he expects to approach the symphonies from a “slightly different angle” compared to the tack his predecessor at the orchestra’s
BEETHOVEN FESTIVAL
When: Sept. 13 to 22 Where: National Arts Centre Info and tickets: nac-cna.ca
helm, Pinchas Zukerman, might have taken.
Shelley said that the music flowing from his approach would be “brisk and quick, energetic and lithe … it’s going to be sometimes disturbing, the sharp edges are not going to be rounded out.”
Girding this approach are the tempo markings that Beethoven added to his symphonies in 1817 following the invention of the metronome — even if adherence to those tempos and the interpretations that flow from them are contentious, Shelley said.
“There’s a school, which is absolutely plausible, that says these tempi from him are way too quick, it all needs much more time to breathe, and to sound rich and nice and sonorous and singing.”
But of the interpretation that he will strive for, Shelley said: “It is no better, no worse, it is a way of engaging with this music which is so multi-faceted, and can easily carry so many different interpretations.”
Shelley also linked his take on the symphonies with accounts of Beethoven as marvellous pianist who savoured extremes during his performances, as well as to Beethoven’s famously cantankerous personality.
“As a person, he was difficult. He had a lot of reasons to be difficult,” said Shelley. “He was a man who shocked and challenged and pushed extremes.
“One of the things that I want to draw out in our performances are these contrasts — these extremes of dynamic contrasts, these extreme tempos that on the page look like they’re way too fast. But it’s deliberate. He’s trying to push things. He’s trying to shock his audience and grab them by the scruff of the neck.”
Whatever you think of Shelley’s interpretation, the festival will also try to answer, through numerous pre- and post-concert discussions free to the public, the question of what makes the symphonies as canonical as they are.
Beethoven’s symphonies, Shelley said, “are a little bit like Shakespeare’s plays. Everybody knows that they ’re great, but the question of why is not always posed.”
Completing the festival at the NAC are other free-admission presentations outside of Southam Hall, including noon-hour concerts from Sept. 14 to 22 featuring a variety of string quartets and “piano marathons” on Sept. 21 and 22 during which Ottawa-area music students and amateurs will perform Beethoven’s sonatas and other compositions.
On Sept. 16, there will even be family entertainment presented by the duo called Marjo2 — NACO violinist Marjolaine Lambert and NACO bassist Marjolaine Fournier — who will don the costumes of their alter egos for a quirky, comical show called Ludwig van Cranky Pants.
Maybe this last show is something that Shelley could enjoy years down the road with his wife and son if it’s re-staged?
“Oh yes, that would be fun … I’d love that,” Shelley said.