COSTA MESA, Calif. — English conductor Alexander Shelley began his tenure as Pacific Symphony’s artistic and music director Oct. 1 at Segerstrom Concert Hall with Mahler’s Second Symphony, a work about mortality, transcendence, and hope. It was an ambitious choice for a beginning, and by the end of the performance it seemed more like a declaration: Listen to what this orchestra has become.
Shelley explained the symphony’s grim trajectory from the stage and conducted precisely and unobtrusively without a score, communicating the command and confidence he felt to his new orchestra. They in turn were remarkably responsive, and what they achieved in Mahler’s vast score was to play it like chamber music: intimate and from the heart. Shelley repeatedly asked for something close to the impossible: silence and restraint without sacrificing momentum.
From the first bars, Pacific Symphony’s sound had a striking clarity. Woodwinds floated into the opening orchestral tapestry with individual personalities — the oboes especially insinuating their way through the texture — while Segerstrom Concert Hall supplied striking spatial definition, allowing individual voices and sections to emerge with unusual clarity from the larger texture.
The result was a performance that felt less like a giant symphonic machine than chamber music on a vast scale. The orchestra pulsed and breathed. The radiant themes appeared almost conversationally, then disappeared into the surrounding sound.
The cellos and double basses were superbly articulate in their opening outbursts, and the first movement built toward a splendid exhilaration in the Allegro; yet even at its most muscular, the performance remained lithe. After the first great climax, Shelley held the musicians back from immediately collapsing into applause-worthy spectacle; the audience did start to applaud, but the music’s momentum quickly reclaimed the room, which was engaged breathlessly for the rest of the evening.
The second movement made the intimate quality even more apparent. The violas and then the cellos phrased with exquisite understatement. Concertmaster Dennis Kim used portamento sparingly in his solos and therefore spoke all the more directly. The pizzicatos beneath the piping flute were charming without becoming cute. Mahler’s nostalgic dance seemed less like an orchestral interlude than a conversation among musicians who happened to have a very large audience.
The scherzo followed without interruption, the bassoons could actually be heard — even their individual notes — and Shelley made the movement’s grotesqueries playful rather than overstated, making sure that the excellent playing in the instrumental riffs was appropriately spotlighted. The final orchestral chord evaporated magically into the celestial clouds from which mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly’s “Urlicht” emerged with simple, noble tones.
After the final orchestral catastrophe launching into the last movement’s chaos, the great swell of climaxes rose organically from within the orchestra, never pushed. The final stages were brilliantly paced, and the arrival of the human voice after all that orchestral turmoil had a miraculous effect. Joining Connolly in the duets, Miah Persson’s soprano was equally affecting, and at moments she seemed overcome by the emotion of the music. Pacific Chorale sang with an inspirational combination of persuasive clarity and overall beauty that kept Mahler’s enormous final vision from becoming merely enormous.
Segerstrom Concert Hall proved equal to the task; it can be bright but sounded warm and made a perfect audiophile setting for the journey, the work of careful balancing. Its spatial definition allowed the orchestra’s many layers to remain audible even at full force, and the offstage brasses, accomplished with a great deal of scurrying, were effective as they should be when their distance is not blurred into the general orchestral sound but becomes part of the drama.
Shelley is joining Rafael Payare in San Diego in surveying and shaping California’s orchestral landscape at very high levels, and the trend could continue starting with the 2027-28 season with the arrivals of Elim Chan in San Francisco and Daniel Harding in Los Angeles. Shelley’s Mahler Second suggested that his contribution may begin with something deceptively simple: music-making of uncommon quality and conviction.
