The orchestral landscape of Orange County, California circa 1990 wasn’t exactly a wasteland, but it wasn’t much more than a sparsely populated outpost either. The region’s most prominent ensemble was the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1978, which had grown from a loose assemblage of university students, community members, and freelancers into a professionalized organization. Performances, which had taken place at a high school auditorium and the Knott’s Berry Farm theme park, had recently moved to the cavernous, multipurpose Orange County Performing Arts Center. It enjoyed successes here and there—a well-received recording of American composers, a performance during the 1984 Olympics at the Los Angeles Music Center—but leadership conflicts and financial struggles dogged the group.
These days? In 2019, the symphony was invited by the League of American Orchestras to join its top tier of large-budget orchestras in the nation. Measured by budget, the Pacific Symphony is the largest orchestra formed in the U.S. in the last 50 years. Performing out of a venue built for it (the lavish, acoustically spectacular Cesar Pelli-designed $240 million Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall), the symphony has a raft of acclaimed festivals and prestigious commissions behind it and has welcomed a Who’s Who of soloists over the past few decades: Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, Lang Lang, Emanuel Ax, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Placido Domingo, Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg, and André Watts, among many.
Pacific Symphony’s April 2025 concert staging of Wagner’s Das Rheingold with stage director Gregory Luis H. Boyle and vocalists. St.Clair had conducted the entire four-opera “Ring” Cycle while serving as general music director and chief conductor of the German National Theatre and Staatskapelle Weimar (2005-08). Photo by Doug Gifford.
This exponential growth can be attributed to any one of a dozen factors: the region’s growing cultural maturity, the synergies created by the arrival of other classical music performing arts organizations, civic boosterism, an economic boom, the addition of sophisticated administrators, and some loyal and generous board members. But regardless of where one points, the county’s lively, engaged, thriving classical music scene revolves around one man: Carl St.Clair.
Regardless of where one looks, Orange County’s lively, engaged, thriving classical music scene revolves around one man: Carl St.Clair.
A protégé of Leonard Bernstein and former assistant conductor to Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Carl St.Clair came west to become the Pacific Symphony’s music director in early 1990. Now, after three and a half decades on the podium, he’s stepping down. His final performances in the concert hall as music director will be the Verdi Requiem, June 5-8. After a final outdoor concert on August 8, St.Clair will become music director laureate, giving way to Artistic and Music Director Designate Alexander Shelley for the 2025-26 season; Shelley will assume full directorship in 2026-27.
He won’t go far. He’s on the schedule to lead the symphony in three concerts during the 2025-26 season. But there will be comparatively less heavy lifting now. In early April, St.Clair reflected on his adventures from his dressing room as he prepared to conduct a dress rehearsal for the Pacific Symphony’s concert staging of Das Rheingold.
“I’m very blessed, that’s all I know,” he said. “I’m from a town of 36 people. I could never have dreamt what’s transpired in my life.” No question, it’s a long way from his hometown of Hochheim, Texas to the great concert halls of the world, to an international career (Berlin’s Komische Oper, the National Symphony of Costa Rica, Weimar’s German National Theater and Staatskapelle), and guest appearances with every major orchestra in the U.S.
Led by Carl St.Clair, Pacific Symphony performs at the Vienna Konzerthaus during its 2006 European tour. The orchestra has made multiple U.S. and international tours during his tenure. Photo courtesy of Pacific Symphony.
Still, it always comes back to Orange County, and the symphonic culture that bears his stamp. “It’s been a special symbiotic relationship,” he says, “and not every community has that. The community has grown with us step by step. It isn’t a community that wanted more orchestral life but we couldn’t provide it, and it’s not that the orchestra wanted more support from the community but the community wasn’t really signed on. It’s that we’ve grown together, very slowly. We needed to grow like an oak tree. It’s the things you don’t see that held us through the ’93 financial dip, through 2006 and 2008, through the pandemic. Through all these dips we continued to grow. And as the relationship grew so did our respect for one another and the realization that we needed one another and that together we can accomplish great things.”
Pacific Symphony, led by Carl St.Clair, made its Carnegie Hall debut in 2018 with a sold-out performance of Passion of Ramakrishna by Philip Glass, which concluded Carnegie Hall’s year-long celebration of the composer’s 80th birthday. Photo courtesy of Pacific Symphony.
In short, St.Clair brought a new energy and a broader vision to the region’s artistic life. “If you look at all the incredibly important orchestral institutions,” he says, “at one point a single person dedicated an enormous amount of time in creating that base. The Concertgebouw with Haitink. Ormandy. Koussevitzky. Szell. Abravenel at Utah. It was a unified philosophy of how things should go.”
A young Carl St.Clair in 1990, at the start of his journey with Pacific Symphony.
Carl St.Clair with mentor Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood, summer of 1985. Photos courtesy of Pacific Symphony.
“In my last conversation with Mr. B[ernstein], he said ‘It’s your turn to fly the flag. I’ve invested in you, and it’s your turn to fly the flag.’ And in that moment, I knew he wasn’t really talking about having a career, but he was talking about flying the flag for what music and the arts can represent for communities and society, and to give music its full reign of power over all it can influence. He always encouraged me to stay here in Orange County, when others said I’d been there too long. Those others didn’t really realize what we were doing here, didn’t realize the mission, and didn’t realize how much fun we were having.
“The Pacific Symphony musicians do it all: ballet, opera, chamber music, pops, family programs, And they do it with such distinguished pride in their work. They approach every single note in front of them with the same high degree of integrity. And that’s the one thing that’s kept me motivated throughout my whole tenure here. The musicians just play with all their hearts.”
Carl St.Clair, second from left, with Pacific Symphony Principal Flute Benjamin Smolen, guest pianist Hye-Jung Kim, and Pacific Symphony Oboe Player Ted Sugata. Photo by Doug Gifford.
While the fun hasn’t stopped, St.Clair came to the awareness that the torch would have to be passed sometime. And for him, after a few years waiting, the timing was finally right.
“I know that every music director has a certain lifespan,” he says. “I’ve been around orchestras where the music directors have maybe stayed a little bit too long, some of them left when the organization really didn’t want them to leave and all that, but my general philosophy is that it’s better to leave five years too early than five minutes too late. I’d been thinking about it for a while, but then, in 2018 the China tour happened. Then we were invited to perform at Carnegie Hall, for the Philip Glass 80th birthday celebration. And then the PBS special came [performing Peter Boyer’s Ellis Island], and that was a huge deal, and so I thought ‘I can’t leave now.’ Then the pandemic hit. And this has been my life, my family’s life, my children’s lives, my wife Susan of 30 years. I just thought, during the pandemic, we needed to survive that.”
Music Director Carl St.Clair gives children a conducting lesson before performing a free concert in the park at Pacific Symphony’s “Symphony in the Cities.” During St.Clair’s tenure, Pacific Symphony has made ongoing engagement with Orange Country’s diverse communities a core part of its mission. Photo courtesy of Pacific Symphony.
“Now we’re coming back stronger than ever, so when we started seeing sunlight again, I thought now would be a good time for the board to look for a successor. And my dream is that this whole transition is going to be just seamless, that our brilliant future doesn’t have a stutter-step and the audience feels assured that things are going to continue. Will they be different? Of course they’re going to be different. But on the other hand, the absolute credo at the soul of the orchestra, of loyalty and family, that’s immovable.
“I’m a very lucky man. I’m a very fortunate musician and conductor. I’m not retiring. I’m young as conductors go. My old conducting teacher said to me, ‘You know, Carl, why a lot of people want to conduct? Because it’s one of the few things you can do when you’re 90 and be better at it than when you were 25.’ And he’s right, my musicianship and understanding of the repertoire is just deepening. I’m as excited about my future as I have been about my 35 years here.”
“I’m as excited about my future as I have been about my 35 years” at the Pacific Symphony, says St. Clair. Photo courtesy of Pacific Symphony.
