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January 17, 2025 – OTTAWA (Canada) – Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) is celebrating an important milestone in its visionary recording project devoted to the tone poems of Richard Strauss. Poema: Ad Astra, the first of four albums fusing Strauss’s creative brilliance with contemporary works by leading Canadian composers, is now available for purchase and streaming worldwide via the Analekta music label.
This latest addition to NACO’s award-winning discography pairs Strauss’s Don Juan with Kelly-Marie Murphy’s Dark Nights, Bright Stars, Vast Universe and Death and Transfiguration with Kevin Lau’s The Infinite Reaches. The NAC Orchestra commissioned both pieces and premiered them in Southam Hall in 2023.
Kevin Lau, Kelly-Marie Murphy, and Alexander Shelley. Photo: Curtis Perry
Strauss has long been a favourite composer of the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s Music Director, Alexander Shelley. He debuted with NACO in 2009 as a guest conductor for a concert program that included Don Juan and is now in his tenth season leading the ensemble. Shelley and NACO first announced their ambitious Strauss recording cycle in the fall of 2023.
The multi-season project expands upon the success of Clara – Robert – Johannes, the Orchestra’s critically acclaimed eight-disk box set exploring the music of Johannes Brahms and Robert and Clara Schumann. The two compositions included in this first volume complement Strauss’s work while showcasing Canadian artistic excellence.
“I gave the composers free rein in how they responded to a particular tone poem. It’s been fascinating to see how they have approached the task and the wonderful individual perspectives they’ve brought to it,” Shelley says. The new pieces on this first album are contrasting and speak to the fact that we live in an age where composers can go in whatever direction they choose.”
Alexander Shelley and Canada’s NAC Orchestra. Photo: Curtis Perry
In Dark Nights, Bright Stars, Vast Universe, Ottawa-based composer Kelly-Marie Murphy responds to Strauss by examining other notable events that occurred while he was writing Don Juan.
“One significant event for me was Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night in 1889,” Murphy recalls. “Another was the discovery of the Horsehead Nebula by Williamina Fleming in 1888. Fleming was one of a group of women who were taught to analyze stellar spectra and catalogue stars for astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory. Her extraordinary life became the subject of my tone poem.” Murphy adds that her piece engages with several themes: “questioning, searching and curiosity, perseverance and determination, and the beauty of the starry sky.”
The Infinite Reaches, meanwhile, is the result of composer and pianist Kevin Lau’s desire to create a genuine modern-day interpretation of Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration.
“I gravitated immediately toward it,” Lau says. Its gripping, transcendent musical narrative resonated powerfully with my own creative sensibilities. At the same time, its central, existential question – what lies beyond death – had begun to occupy my own thoughts with increasing regularity.”
Alexander Shelley and the NAC Orchestra will grow their Strauss series over the next two seasons with additional commissioned companion pieces from Canadian or Canada-based composers. Subsequent recordings will focus on Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (paired with Ian Cusson’s IQ84), Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks and the Suite from Der Rosenkavalier (featuring new works by Alexina Louie and John Estacio), and Ein Heldenleben (joined with a work yet to be commissioned). NACO will release them individually and then as a four-disc box set.
ABOUT CANADA’S NATIONAL ARTS CENTRE ORCHESTRA
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.
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 NAC 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.
ABOUT ALEXANDER SHELLEY
Alexander Shelley succeeded Pinchas Zukerman as Music Director of Canada’s NAC Orchestra in September 2015. The ensemble has since been praised as being “transformed, hungry, bold, and unleashed” (Ottawa Citizen) and Shelley’s programming is credited for turning the Orchestra into “one of the more audacious in North America” (Maclean’s).
Shelley is a champion of Canadian creation. Recent hallmarks include multimedia projects Life Reflected and UNDISRUPTED and three major new ballets in partnership with NAC Dance for Encount3rs. He is passionate about arts education and nurturing the next generation of musicians. He is an Ambassador for Ottawa’s OrKidstra, a charitable social development program that teaches children life skills through making music together.
In April 2022, Shelley debuted at Carnegie Hall with the NAC Orchestra in its long-awaited return. In the spring of 2019, he led the Orchestra on its critically acclaimed 50th-anniversary European tour, with stops in London, Paris, Copenhagen, and Stockholm.
Shelley is also the Principal Associate Conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Music Director of Artis—Naples and the Naples Philharmonic in Florida. Shelley will also be the next Artistic and Music Director of the Pacific Symphony in Los Angeles’s Orange County. The initial five-year term begins in the 2026–2027 season, with Shelley serving as Music Director-Designate from September 2025.
Previous releases with the NAC Orchestra include the Juno-nominated New Worlds, Life Reflected, ENCOUNT3RS, The Bounds of Our Dreams, the acclaimed multi-volume Clara – Robert – Johannes series, all with Canadian label Analekta, the Truth in Our Time with Orange Mountain Music, and Two Orchestras, One Symphony with Analekta.
ABOUT KELLY MARIE-MURPHY
With music described as “breathtaking” (Kitchener-Waterloo Record), “imaginative and expressive” (The National Post), “a pulse-pounding barrage on the senses” (The Globe and Mail), and “Bartok on steroids” (Birmingham News), Kelly-Marie Murphy’s voice is well known on the Canadian music scene. She has received many prizes, nationally and internationally, including the Azrieli Music Prize and the Leger Prize.
Murphy was born on a NATO base in Sardegna, Italy, and grew up on Canadian Armed Forces bases all across Canada. She began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary with William Jordan and Allan Bell and later received a PhD in composition from the University of Leeds, England, where she studied with Philip Wilby. After living and working for many years in the Washington D.C. area, where she was designated “an alien of extraordinary ability” by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, she is now based in Ottawa, quietly pursuing a career as a freelance composer.
ABOUT KEVIN LAU
One of Canada’s most versatile and sought-after young composers, Kevin Lau (born in 1982), has been commissioned by some of Canada’s most prominent artists and ensembles, and his work has been performed internationally in the United States, France, Denmark, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic. A prolific composer of orchestral, chamber, ballet, opera, and film music, he served as Affiliate Composer of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 2012 to 2015.
To date, he has produced seven works for the TSO. Shortly after, he was commissioned to write two ballets with choreographer Guillaume Côté: a full-length ballet (Le Petit Prince) for the National Ballet of Canada and a half-hour ballet (Dark Angels) for the National Arts Centre Orchestra. He served as Composer in Residence for the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra from 2021 to 2023.
ABOUT THE NATIONAL ARTS CENTRE
The National Arts Centre is Canada’s bilingual, multi-disciplinary home for the performing arts. The NAC presents, creates, produces, and co-produces performing arts programming in various streams — the NAC Orchestra, Dance, English Theatre, French Theatre, Indigenous Theatre, and Popular Music and Variety — and nurtures the next generation of audiences and artists from across Canada. The NAC is located in the National Capital Region on the unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation.
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