Studying a score is like reading a novel, says conductor Alexander Shelley. ‘You feel the same kind of sense of intimacy with composers and their world, as you do with writers and their narratives.’ It’s an analogy which seems fitting, given the focus of Shelley’s latest concert series with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Launching at Cadogan Hall on November 7, ’Myths and Fairytales,’ explores the ‘beautiful and evocative music that was written to describe stories,’ explains Shelley. As such it’s the perfect way to explore Romantic repertoire: ’The emergence of very descriptive music - tone poems where you can almost literally hear the story unfolding - really happened during the nineteenth century’. So there’s nowhere better to start, in the opening concert of the series, than with music of the high Romantic Russian School: Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty suite, Variations on a Rococo theme, along with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, ‘which chronicles four of the stories of the 1001 nights where Scheherazade evades death by keeping the sultan enthralled by her stories while he falls asleep.’