Eugene Symphony starts its new season with Fate & Fire — and new artistic director/conductor, Alex Prior

Posted on EugeneScene by Daniel Buckwalter | Sep 30, 2025 | Music

Alex Prior chuckles at the thought of legacy. “I’m just getting started,”
he says.

Alex Prior 2025. Photo by Bob Williams.

Yet Prior — a British native who will turn 33 years old days ahead of making his formal debut as the Eugene Symphony Orchestra’s artistic director and conductor on Oct. 12 — is thinking aspirationally of the orchestra. In particular, he notes in a wide-ranging interview with Eugene Scene that he would love for Eugene to be known not just for track and field, but as “Track and Symphony Town USA.”

“It’s really a gem,” he says of the symphony.

It’s a gem he sought out nearly a year ago with a week’s worth of rehearsals and a concert, guiding the Eugene Symphony through the music of Modest Mussorgsky, Florence Price, Ludwig van Beethoven and Antonín Dvořák. He was the first of five finalists seeking to replace Francesco Lecce-Chong as artistic director/conductor.

And it is a gem, he adds, that he knew he truly wanted just five minutes into his first rehearsal with the musicians.

“There was a huge chemistry,” he recalls. “I felt these were musical brothers and sisters. I was able to be authentic.”

Prior has strong Pacific Northwest roots and also is an avid driver of countryside roads in throughout the United States and Canada (“I love the landscape of America,” he says, as well as pickup trucks). In fact, he remembers getting the call from Eugene Symphony in March — offering him the job — while he was driving on a country road outside Seattle, and he had one thing to do before answering the call.

“I pulled over,” he says. “I was so nervous.”

But he had nailed the audition, and this summer he conducted the symphony in concerts at Eugene’s Cuthbert Amphitheater and Bohemia Park in Cottage Grove. Now, it’s time to take center stage as the symphony begins its 60th year, and Prior is ready.

He notes that in Europe, the Eugene Symphony Orchestra is a known brand. Even Prior’s father, who is not a musician, “ has heard that Eugene had an important orchestra,” the son says.

He believes he’s “a natural fit,” referring both to the symphony and the Eugene area. “I think it’s a fabulous orchestra.”

Prior was a child prodigy whose first love was ballet. He wanted to dance, and he gave it a go until a Russian-born woman who taught the class convinced him — and Prior notes that she was emphatic about it — to seek paths elsewhere.

That would be music, and he has played the French horn, piano, trumpet, mandolin, cello, and organ. He started performing at age 9 and conducting at age 14.

At the tender age of 13, he left home and entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in Russia to study composition with Boris Tishchenko as well as opera and symphonic conducting with Alexander Alexeev. In 2009, at age 17, he graduated with master’s degrees in symphonic and operatic conducting as well as in composition from the Conservatory.

He even had a star turn on the London-based Channel 4 network series, The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies, where, as a 16-year-old, he traveled the world to pick four soloists for a concerto he composed for them.

In 2010, the Seattle Symphony appointed Prior as assistant conductor, and in 2017, at just 23 years old, he was appointed chief conductor of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in the Canadian province of Alberta.

“It is my life,” he says.

In his October 2024 audition concert at the Hult Center, Prior used every inch of the podium to engage the orchestra, dancing with the folk beats of the Dvořák piece and punctuating the staccato notes with a fist. He was an all-encompassing presence on the podium. He made conducting look fun and easy.

It is fun, as Prior noted with a relaxed demeanor in the symphony’s conference room in downtown Eugene — but easy? “It’s a much harder profession than it looks,” he says. “It’s sort of like method acting.”

But back to aspirations for a moment: Prior notes that he has spoken at length with Marin Alsop (the symphony’s artistic director from 1989 to 1996) and good friend Giancarlo Guerrero (artistic director from 2002 to 2009, who will guest conduct the Eugene Symphony this season in January 2026), to get the lay of the land from their perspectives and understand better his new community of the next four years.

Braided into Prior’s artistic outlook are two areas of enhancement that will constantly drive him: “What I consider is where I want to take the orchestra,” and “How do I empower my colleagues?”

He will seek out contemporary composers from around the world whose works need to be heard, and all of it, he emphasizes, falls in line with the concept that this “is a creative process. It’s not a museum.”

To the symphony’s fans, Prior speaks with love to the idea that the symphony can foster “unification” in the community, by “being relevant to daily lives.”

“I want us to be a gathering place,” he says. “It’s a very kind art.”

And it all begins Oct. 12, when the Eugene Symphony Orchestra begins the Masterworks Series for the 2025-26 season, featuring works composed by Leonard Bernstein, Vivian Fung, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and featuring violinist Kristin Lee.

Eugene Symphony season opener with new maestro Alex Prior 

When: 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2025

Where: Silva Concert Hall, Hult Center for the Performing Arts, One Eugene Center (corner of Sixth and Willamette streets)

Tickets: $22 to $77 ($10 for students), available online at eugenesymphony.org or from the Hult Center box office, 541-682-5000