Naples Philharmonic

From Marco Island to Pelican Bay

The ensemble began in 1982 as the Naples/Marco Philharmonic, founded by the conductor Mizzette Fuenzalida and executive director Carol Cohan. Its first season amounted to four concerts. A full orchestral concert followed in 1983, and with it the involvement of Myra Janco Daniels, the advertising executive who joined the board that year and set about raising money for a permanent concert hall rather than a borrowed school auditorium.

Ground was broken on that hall in 1987 and the building was finished in 1989. Frances Pew Hayes Hall opened on 3 November 1989 as the centrepiece of the Philharmonic Center for the Arts. The orchestra followed the building: by 1990 it had moved to a full-time core roster and taken the name The Naples Philharmonic.

The campus kept growing around it. The Naples Museum of Art opened in 2000. In 2013 the whole organisation — orchestra, halls and museum — was rebranded Artis—Naples, a single identity covering performing and visual arts. The museum, now The Baker Museum, was renovated and expanded in a scheme by Weiss/Manfredi celebrated in 2020, and in 2025 it was accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the first accredited museum in Collier County. The site is now the Kimberly K. Querrey and Louis A. Simpson Cultural Campus: 8.5 acres, five buildings, two performance halls, and more than 800 performing and visual arts experiences a year.

Five podiums in four decades

Timothy Russell held the music directorship from 1984 to 1993, nine years that took the orchestra from part-time to permanent. A recording he conducted, The Manhattan Transfer Meets Tubby the Tuba, was nominated for a Grammy in 1995. Christopher Seaman followed from 1993 to 2004, Jorge Mester from 2004 to 2012, and Andrey Boreyko from 2014 to 2022.

National exposure came through public television rather than the record industry: A Century of Broadway was broadcast in 2002, Fiesta at the Philharmonic in 2003. Those were the years in which a seasonal resort orchestra established that it could hold a September-to-June schedule.

The scale of the present operation is the clearest measure of what accumulated. The Naples Philharmonic plays more than 140 orchestral and chamber concerts a year, plus opera, ballet, education, community and special-event dates, split between the 1,477-seat Hayes Hall, the 283-seat Myra J. Daniels Pavilion and venues around south-west Florida. Subscription series run from Masterworks and Pops to the Sypert Salon for pre-19th-century chamber repertoire and the Wang Chamber Music series for the mid-19th and 20th centuries.

Shelley's first two seasons

Alexander Shelley arrived as artistic and music director designate in 2023-24, took up the Sharon and Timothy Ubben Artistic and Music Director title for 2024-25, and began a second season in 2025-26. The remit is wider than the orchestra: it covers programming across the whole multidisciplinary organisation, including The Baker Museum.

Two things from that period are worth noting because they are structural rather than decorative. Shelley has taken part in the hiring or tenure process of 16 current members of the orchestra, which means a meaningful share of the players on stage were chosen or confirmed under him. And he has pushed commissioning: the orchestra gave the world premiere of African Queens for symphony orchestra, written by the seven composers who work as the Blacknificent 7 and performed with the soprano Karen Slack, alongside the Inscription II programme.

The cross-disciplinary half of the job has been taken literally. Shelley sat as a juror of independent films at the 2024 Naples International Film Festival and has appeared in public conversation with the artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and the author Margaret Atwood. The violinist James Ehnes continued as artistic partner through the 2025-26 season, working with the players in various formats; Jack Everly marked a 16th season as principal pops conductor.

The January 2026 agreements

On 22 January 2026 Artis—Naples announced two things at once. Shelley's contract as artistic and music director was extended to the end of the decade, with an option to extend further. Alongside it, the musicians of the Naples Philharmonic ratified a new three-year collectively bargained agreement running through the 2028-29 season.

The terms were published rather than left vague. The agreement carries more than 13% in salary increases over its term, taking base salary for non-principal positions to over $81,000 by the end of the contract. It adds two new positions to the orchestra, and it introduces fresh contractual language covering the creation of recordings for dance and film projects — the practical groundwork for an orchestra whose parent organisation programmes across art forms.

Negotiations ran over several months. Artis—Naples was represented by CEO and president Kathleen van Bergen and David Filner, executive vice-president for artistic operations. The players were represented by an elected committee chaired by the violinist Marlena Chow Morgan, with John Evans (principal timpani), Forrest Johnston (assistant principal trumpet), Natalie Lee (violin) and Lisa Mattson (viola). For an American orchestra in 2026, a settled contract through 2028-29 and a music director booked to 2029-30 is the unglamorous substance of stability.

To Light: The Art of Hope

The 2026-27 season, announced in July 2026, runs under the title To Light: The Art of Hope, and its spine is a complete Beethoven symphony cycle marking 200 years since the composer's death. Shelley has framed the nine symphonies as a journey through struggle, defiance, humour, tenderness and joy, and argued that art's most essential gift is its ability to imagine light beyond darkness.

The cycle is compressed into three March weekends in Hayes Hall: Symphonies 1 and 2 on 4 March 2027, 3 and 4 on 6 March, 5 and 6 on 18 March, 7 and 8 on 19 March, and the Ninth on 20 March with Karen Slack, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Michael Spyres and Alfred Walker, preceded by Jake Runestad's A Silence Haunts Me — a work about Beethoven's deafness placed deliberately ahead of the Ode to Joy.

Around it sits a ten-programme Masterworks series. It opens on 29 and 30 October 2026 with Zwilich, Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto with Yeol Eum Son and Brahms's First Symphony. Markus Stenz brings Leila Josefowicz for John Adams's Scheherazade.2 on 20 and 21 November; Shelley conducts Anthony McGill and The Firebird on 10 and 11 December; Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson appear on 7 and 9 January 2027 in a programme including Three Scenes from Nixon in China. Teddy Abrams conducts the orchestra's own concertmaster, Zachary DePue, in Szymanowski's Second Violin Concerto on 28 and 29 January. James Ehnes leads Mozart from the violin in February, Stephanie Childress conducts Time for Three in April, and the season closes with Holst's The Planets on 29 April and 1 May 2027.

The wider season carries names from well outside the classical subscription base — Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Audra McDonald, Sutton Foster, Kelli O'Hara — plus six Broadway touring productions including Hamilton, The Sound of Music and The Great Gatsby, and museum exhibitions running from The Surrealist International to a Louise Nevelson retrospective.

Who is on stage now

The roster changed again on 8 September 2026, when Artis—Naples named six new musicians: Alex Heidt, Jesús Linárez and Myles Mocarski in the violin sections, Ryan Babe in the cellos, Ricardo Alberto Puche Bravo on a one-year bass appointment, and Melvin Cortez Jackson as assistant principal horn. Shelley's published comment was that each brings a distinctive musical voice, perspective and experience to the orchestra.

Three internal promotions landed with them, all of them load-bearing chairs: Daniela Shtéreva from section violin to associate concertmaster, Davis Pierson from associate principal bass to principal bass, and Matthew Medlock to associate principal bass for one year. Read against the 16 players Shelley has helped hire or tenure and the two posts the new labour agreement adds, the sound of the section strings and the bass line is still being assembled rather than maintained.