Repertoire
Andante moderato
Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 “Unfinished”
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andante con moto
An aura of mystery has long surrounded the origins and history of the “unfinished” B minor symphony of Viennese composer Franz Schubert (1797–1828). In 1822, he had completed and fully orchestrated the first two movements. He had also written, in full score, the first two pages of a scherzo, possibly the third movement; their existence suggests that he had planned a four-movement symphony, but ultimately, he did not continue the project. In 1823, in gratitude to the Graz Music Society for awarding him an honorary diploma, Schubert sent his friend and leading member of the Society Anselm Hüttenbrenner these finished parts of his latest orchestral score. For reasons that remain a mystery, Hüttenbrenner kept them concealed until 1860, when he revealed them to the conductor Johann von Herbeck. Dumbfounded at the discovery, Herbeck eventually conducted the premiere of the work’s two completed movements in Vienna on December 17, 1865—37 years after the composer’s death. His efforts helped to establish Schubert internationally, with subsequent performances of the “unfinished” symphony taking place soon after in Germany, England, France, and North America.
Although there have been arguments made in support of various attempts to complete the work, the B minor symphony has endured in its two-movement form, as one of Schubert’s orchestral masterpieces. In it, he brought to fruition his own individual, subjective conception of Classical symphonic form (as developed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven), thereby pushing the genre to new heights of creative expression. For one, the first movement is in B minor—a key that had, until then, been generally avoided in the symphonic literature. Schubert exploits its harmonic potential to evoke a hitherto unprecedented sense of pathos, the first of two emotional realms he juxtaposes in the movement. The Allegro moderato begins with sombre phrases, rising and falling on cellos and basses, after which violins establish and maintain a backdrop of nervous energy, as oboe and clarinet introduce a mournful tune. Sudden accented chords inject anxiety and urgency, as the music reaches an initial climax. Afterwards, bassoons and horns initiate an astonishing shift to the realm of sunny G major, featuring an assuring melody first sung by cellos over syncopated accompaniment. It’s taken up by violins, but soon peters out to a pause; then, as if suddenly afflicted, the earlier anxieties return. Later, the soothing second theme reappears, but as soon as it resolves, a loud chord brings us back immediately to the B minor realm, and the exposition is repeated.
On the third appearance of the sombre opening, we enter the central development section, where this theme is worked up into agonizing cries; listen for the extreme contrasts between those and the quiet statements of the cello melody’s syncopated accompaniment. A forceful statement of the theme on full orchestra triggers a stormy passage, with furious strings and ferocious rhythms. Gradually, the fury subsides, leading back to the recapitulation, which avoids the sombre opening and goes directly to the plaintive tune on the clarinet and oboe. The music proceeds as before, with some variation. As it comes out of the realm of the consoling melody, the sombre theme that was bypassed in the reprise now returns, and swells to a final climax. Its opening phrase is mournfully reiterated, and four chords bring this most anguished of symphonic movements to an end.
The second movement takes us far away from the angst of the first to a place of otherworldly serenity. Three shifting chords on horns and bassoons overtop a descending plucked bass line arrive at an exquisitely tender theme, sung by the violins in ethereal E major. Its peaceful progress suddenly breaks out into a forceful passage, but then, just as abruptly, returns to tranquility. The ensuing section features a poignant melody, beginning on clarinet then continuing on oboe, accompanied by gently pulsating violins and violas; the subtly shifting harmonies are a Schubertian hallmark. Soon, however, the delicate atmosphere is torn by a full-orchestra outburst, with the haunting clarinet tune now forming a mighty bass line. The theme is then quietly contemplated by the violins and cellos in counterpoint, eventually dissolving into a single repeated phrase, which returns us to the opening mood.
The themes are once again worked through but with variations; for example, the second theme now begins on oboe, and is answered by the clarinet, and at the orchestral outburst, the melody appears in the violins. Eventually, woodwinds and horns wind down the music. Out of the quiet, the violins emerge, twice, with a sustained note to which the woodwinds respond with the opening phrase of the tender melody, first making a surprising harmonic shift (to the far-removed key of A-flat major), then back to E major, on which the movement comes to a gentle conclusion. In ending with this rarified sound world, it’s not difficult to consider that, perhaps, Schubert may have felt unable to add more to the symphony. To an extent, what he left us feels complete as is—the two movements a seemingly perfect balance of lyrical pathos and poignant serenity.
Program note by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD
Suite from The Firebird (1919)
Artists
Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC) Orchestra is praised for the passion and clarity of its performances, its visionary learning and engagement programs, and its unwavering support of Canadian creativity. The NAC Orchestra is based in Ottawa, Canada’s national capital, and has grown into one of the country’s most acclaimed and dynamic ensembles since its founding in 1969. Under the leadership of Music Director Alexander Shelley, the NAC Orchestra reflects the fabric and values of Canada, engaging communities from coast to coast to coast through inclusive programming, compelling storytelling, and innovative partnerships.
Since taking the helm in 2015, Shelley has shaped the Orchestra’s artistic vision, building on the legacy of his predecessor, Pinchas Zukerman, who led the ensemble for 16 seasons. Shelley’s influence extends beyond the NAC. He serves as Principal Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the United Kingdom and Artistic and Music Director of Artis—Naples and the Naples Philharmonic in Florida. In addition to his other conducting roles, the Pacific Symphony in Los Angeles’s Orange County announced Shelley’s appointment as its next Artistic and Music Director. The initial five-year term begins in the 2026–2027 season, with Shelley serving as Music Director-Designate from September 2025. Shelley’s leadership is complemented by Principal Guest Conductor John Storgårds, an internationally renowned conductor and violinist who has led some of the world’s finest ensembles, and Principal Youth Conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser, known for creating innovative and engaging community programming. In 2024, the Orchestra marked a new chapter with the appointment of Henry Kennedy as its first-ever Resident Conductor.
The Orchestra has a rich history of partnerships with renowned artists such as James Ehnes, Angela Hewitt, Renée Fleming, Hilary Hahn, Jeremy Dutcher, Jan Lisiecki, Ray Chen, and Yeol Eum Son, underscoring its reputation as a destination for world-class talent. As one of the most accessible, inclusive, and collaborative orchestras in the world, the NAC Orchestra uses music as a universal language to communicate the deepest of human emotions and connect people through shared experiences.
A hallmark of the NAC Orchestra is its national and international tours. The Orchestra has performed concerts in every Canadian province and territory and earned frequent invitations to perform abroad. These tours spotlight Canadian composers and artists, bringing their voices to stages across North America, the United Kindom, Europe, and Asia.
The NAC Orchestra has also established a rich discography, including many of the over 80 orchestral works it has commissioned over the years. These include:
- The 2024 album Two Orchestras, One Symphony, a grand-scale interpretation of the late Quebec composer Jacques Hétu’s monumental Symphony No. 5., produced in collaboration with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir
- The 2024 album Truth in Our Time, including the premiere recording of Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 13, commissioned by the National Arts Centre Orchestra
- Clara - Robert - Johannes: a multi-year, multi-album exploration of the music of Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms, featuring pianists Angela Hewitt, Stewart Goodyear, and Gabriela Montero
- The groundbreaking Life Reflected, which includes “My Name is Amanda Todd” by the late Jocelyn Morlock (winner of the 2018 Juno for Classical Composition of the Year)
- Ana Sokolović’s “Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes,” 2019 Juno Winner for Classical Composition of the Year (from the 2019 Juno-nominated New Worlds)
- The 2020 JUNO-nominated The Bounds of Our Dreams, featuring pianist Alain Lefèvre
- Angela Hewitt’s 2015 Juno Award-winning album of Mozart Piano Concertos
The NAC Orchestra’s Learning and Community Engagement initiatives are rooted in creating inclusive and accessible programs for audiences in the National Capital Region and across Canada. These initiatives include family-focused performances, Music Circle workshops specifically designed for individuals on the autism spectrum, and sensory-friendly concerts. Additionally, the Orchestra offers exceptional programming for students, teachers, and learners of all ages, including matinee performances, open rehearsals, instrumental workshops, and digital resources, ensuring that arts learning and engagement in music remain a priority for young audiences and the broader community. The Orchestra’s annual Mentorship Program brings 50 early-career orchestral musicians from around the world to Ottawa to participate in a three-week professional development experience with the world-class NAC Orchestra. Through these efforts, the NAC Orchestra continues to foster meaningful connections with diverse audiences, making music a shared and inclusive experience.
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“A natural communicator, both on and off the podium” (The Telegraph), Alexander Shelley performs across six continents with the world’s finest orchestras and soloists.
With a conducting technique described as “immaculate” (Yorkshire Post) and a “precision, distinction and beauty of gesture not seen since Lorin Maazel” (Le Devoir), Shelley is known for the clarity and integrity of his interpretations and the creativity and vision of his programming. To date, he has spearheaded over 40 major world premieres, including highly praised cycles of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms symphonies, operas, ballets, and innovative multi-media productions.
Since 2015, he has served as Music Director of Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra and Principal Associate Conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In April 2023, he was appointed Artistic and Music Director of Artis—Naples in Florida, providing artistic leadership for the Naples Philharmonic and the entire multidisciplinary arts organization. The 2024–2025 season is Shelley’s inaugural season in this position. In addition to his other conducting roles, the Pacific Symphony in Los Angeles’s Orange County announced Shelley’s appointment as its next Artistic and Music Director. The initial five-year term begins in the 2026–2027 season, with Shelley serving as Music Director-Designate from September 2025.
Additional 2024–2025 season highlights include performances with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Colorado Symphony, the National Philharmonic in Warsaw, the Seattle Symphony, the Chicago Civic Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland). Shelley is a regular guest with some of the finest orchestras of Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australasia, including Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Helsinki, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Malaysian, Oslo, Rotterdam and Stockholm philharmonic orchestras, and the Sao Paulo, Houston, Seattle, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Montreal, Toronto, Munich, Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney, and New Zealand symphony orchestras.
In September 2015, Shelley succeeded Pinchas Zukerman as Music Director of Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, the youngest in its history. The ensemble has since been praised as “an orchestra transformed ... hungry, bold, and unleashed” (Ottawa Citizen), and his programming is credited for turning the orchestra “almost overnight ... into one of the more audacious orchestras in North America” (Maclean’s). Together, they have undertaken major tours of Canada, Europe, and Carnegie Hall, where they premiered Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 13.
They have commissioned ground-breaking projects such as Life Reflected and Encount3rs, released multiple Juno-nominated albums and, most recently, responded to the pandemic and social justice issues of the era with the NACO Live and Undisrupted video series.
In August 2017, Shelley concluded his eight-year tenure as Chief Conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, a period hailed by press and audiences alike as the orchestra’s golden era.
Shelley’s operatic engagements have included The Merry Widow and Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet (Royal Danish Opera), La bohème (Opera Lyra/National Arts Centre), Louis Riel (Canadian Opera Company/National Arts Centre), lolanta (Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen), Così fan tutte (Opéra national de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon), The Marriage of Figaro (Opera North), Tosca (Innsbruck), and both Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni in semi-staged productions at the NAC.
Winner of the Echo Music Prize and the Deutsche Grunderpreis, Shelley was conferred with the Cross of the Federal Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in April 2023 in recognition of his services to music and culture.
Through his work as Founder and Artistic Director of the Schumann Camerata and their pioneering “440Hz” series in Düsseldorf, as founding Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen’s “Zukunftslabor” and through his regular tours leading the National Youth Orchestra of Germany, inspiring future generations of classical musicians and listeners has always been central to Shelley’s work.
He regularly gives informed and passionate pre- and post-concert talks on his programs, as well as numerous interviews and podcasts on the role of classical music in society. In Nuremberg alone, over nine years, he hosted over half a million people at the annual Klassik Open Air concert, Europe’s largest classical music event.
Born in London in October 1979 to celebrated concert pianists, Shelley studied cello and conducting in Germany. He gained widespread attention when he was unanimously awarded first prize at the 2005 Leeds Conductors Competition. The press described him as “the most exciting and gifted young conductor to have taken this highly prestigious award.”
The Music Director role is supported by Elinor Gill Ratcliffe, C.M., ONL, LL.D. (hc).
Florence B. Price (1887–1953)
Florence Price was an American composer, pianist, organist, and teacher. She created over 300 works, including for orchestra, various combinations of chamber ensemble, choir, voice and piano, organ, and solo piano. Her compositions often blend Euro-American art music forms with elements from her African American heritage, such as melodies that reference those of spirituals.
During her life, Price was the first African American woman to earn major recognition as a symphonic composer. However, despite her successes, she struggled to have her works widely performed, and openly acknowledged that her being a woman and a person of colour were barriers. Much of her catalogue was neglected after her death, but in recent years, new research about her life and work and the revival of her compositions in performance have begun to more fully illuminate her contributions to American music.
Price (née Smith) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on April 9, 1887, during a period when white supremacy was being restored in the South. Her mother was her first music teacher, who carefully nurtured her talent. Price went on to study composition at Boston’s New England Conservatory, one of the few institutions that admitted African Americans at the time. After earning diplomas in organ and piano, she returned to the South to teach and compose. In 1928, to escape growing racial oppression in Little Rock, Price and her family moved to Chicago. There, she flourished creatively; she won prizes and publication contracts for her piano pieces, penned popular songs for radio commercials, and arranged spirituals for performance. In 1931, she began writing symphonies. Her Symphony in E Minor won the Wanamaker Prize in 1932, which led to its performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frederick Stock—the first work by a Black woman composer to be performed by a major American orchestra.
The success of her E Minor symphony cemented Price’s reputation and her orchestral works were subsequently performed by ensembles such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Celebrated singers such as Marion Anderson and Leontyne Price interpreted her songs, and her organ and piano pieces, which she also taught, were regularly performed. Price remained active as a composer and teacher until her death in Chicago on June 9, 1953.
By Dr. Hannah Chan-Hartley
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
During his remarkably short life, Austrian composer Franz Peter Schubert was enormously prolific, and made important contributions to vocal music (most notably, the German lied), piano music, chamber music, and orchestral music. For his instrumental music in particular, he drew on the techniques of Haydn, Mozart, and later, Beethoven, while shaping them to convey new depths of emotional expression. Among the hallmarks of his idiosyncratic compositional style are unexpected key changes and novel harmonic juxtapositions, looser formal structures, and lyrically expansive melodies.
Born in Vienna on January 31, 1797, Schubert took his first lessons in piano, violin, singing, and organ during his childhood. His talent for composing was already evident in his earliest surviving works—including string quartets and his first symphony—written at age 13. However, given the precariousness of a career as an independent composer, he became certified as a teacher and took a position at his father’s school. Even with the full-time demands of the job, he continued to compose, and was startingly productive; by 1816, not yet 20 years of age, he had written over 300 solo songs, five symphonies, four Singspiele (a type of German opera), seven string quartets, and numerous smaller works. Yet, public recognition of his work by way of performances and publications did not develop until after 1817.
By 1822, Schubert was thriving as a professional composer. His extraordinary output, achieved through a demanding work schedule, was matched by a hedonistic and likely promiscuous social life that he pursued with equal intensity. In early 1823, he began showing symptoms of syphilis, the physical manifestations of which led him to become increasingly reclusive. His musical work, however, continued unabated, and in what would be the last four years of his life, he completed several significant masterpieces, including the String Quartet in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”), the Ninth Symphony (“the Great”), the Piano Sonata in D Major, and the song cycle Die Winterreise. Schubert died in Vienna on November 19, 1828. Most of his vast catalogue of compositions only came to light after his death.
Link(s) to composer portrait/headshot:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Franz_Schubert_by_Wilhelm_August_Rieder_1875.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schub-CC.jpg
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was one of the most influential musical figures of the 20th century and his music is still among the most frequently performed today. His works encompass ballet and opera, orchestral pieces, songs, choral works, and chamber and solo instrumental works, among others. As a whole, Stravinsky’s compositional catalogue is stylistically diverse and reflects his interest in and absorption of certain major musical developments of the period: from the colourful Russian nationalism of his early ballets, to an aggressive, avant-garde style in the First World War Years, to the pared-down neoclassicism of the 1920s to 1950s, to finally, 12-tone serialism.
Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), near St. Petersburg, on June 17, 1882. The third son of Fyodor, one of Russia’s most notable bass-baritones, the young Igor grew up surrounded by musicians and composers who frequented his parents’ flat, where he also had access to his father’s large library of music scores. He entered St. Petersburg University as a law student though he wanted to study music; he ultimately did so in his own time, taking lessons first with students of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and later with the Russian master himself. In 1910, Stravinsky was catapulted to fame with the Paris Opéra premiere of the ballet, The Firebird, his first of many collaborations with the impresario Serge Diaghilev and his Ballet Russes. Petrushka followed in 1911 and in 1913, The Rite of Spring—a shockingly violent and dissonant score that became a landmark work of early 20th century musical modernism.
After experimenting with avant-garde techniques, Stravinsky embarked on an extended period composing in the “neo-classical” style. In these works, he invigorated 18th-century forms and processes with his own harmonic and rhythmic methods. This aesthetic shift coincided with a move from his native Russia to France in 1920, and continued when he emigrated to the United States in 1941. In the late 1950s, Stravinsky turned to the technique of serialism, which became the basis of his late compositions. Throughout these decades, he maintained a commitment to concert work, appearing as a piano soloist and conductor in performances of his own music. Stravinsky died in New York, April 6, 1971, and is buried on Venice’s cemetery island of San Michele, near the grave of Serge Diaghilev.
Link(s) to composer portrait/headshot:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Igor_Stravinsky_LOC_32392u.jpg
https://loc.getarchive.net/media/igor-stravinsky
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