Music Director

Jeffrey Stirling joined the Saint Paul Civic Symphony as its Music Director in 2007. Stirling has conducted symphonic concerts and operas in North America and Europe. He has been a guest conductor with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, a cover conductor with the Minnesota Orchestra, and has appeared with the Skylark Opera, the Lakes Area Music Festival, the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra and other regional ensembles. Stirling was also a conductor with the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies (GTCYS) for eleven (11) seasons.

Stirling holds degrees from Yale and Northwestern universities and pursued advanced studies at the Paris Conservatory under the auspices of the Fondation des États-Unis, as well as at the Fontainebleau School in France and the Tanglewood and Salzburg music festivals. Leonard Slatkin chose Stirling to take part in the National Conducting Institute at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His mentors include Victor Yampolsky, Seiji Ozawa, the late Pierre Boulez, Marin Alsop, and the late Charles Bruck.

Stirling has also served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota School of Music (including as Interim Director of Orchestral Studies), Luther College, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Olaf College, the University of Northern Iowa, and St. Cloud State University.

As SPCS Music Director, Stirling has journeyed to Nagasaki Japan on two occasions, mostly recently in the summer of 2025, when twenty (20) SPCS members and a similar number of family and friends performed with the Nagasaki Symphony Orchestra (NSO), our sister orchestra since 1995. The combined orchestra concert included Minnesota composer Steve Heitzig’s “Green Hope After Black Rain”, commissioned by the SPCS as a tribute to Nagasaki’s citizens, and in memory of the atomic bombing of their city 80 years earlier. Stirling and the other travelers also paid their honors to Nagasaki’s Peace Park and other memorials, enjoyed homestays, and toured the city. Nagasaki’s mayor, city council members, the NSO, and the Nagasaki Sister City Committee members hosted Stirling and our traveling musicians and families at a grand reception, where those assembled reaffirmed our vows of friendship and peace into the future.

Under Stirling’s baton, the SPCS has grown in stature and scope, while continuing our commitment to provide audiences as well as orchestra members with free and high-quality concert programs that move beyond the standard classical repertoire and appeal to the next generation of classical music lovers. Stirling leads our programming of solo performances by both local professionals and emerging young artists, collaboration with other performing arts organizations, and inclusion of works by composers with a great diversity of origins, cultures, and identities.