The 2026/27 season marks Rafael Payare’s fifth as Music Director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. They will open OSM’s 93rd season in grand style with the expressive power of Mahler, continuing the cycle begun in 2022. The opening concert on September 16 and 17 will bring together Das klagende Lied (Song of Lamentation), an early work based on an epic tale, and excerpts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) with its highly refined instrumentation and musical exploration of the folk-tale universe.
On September 23, for the first time in over a decade, the OSM will welcome pianist Lang Lang in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 5 under Payare’s direction. On October 21 and 22, Leonidas Kavakos joins the Orchestra on stage to play Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, op. 35, in a program conducted by Payare, completed by Elysium by Canadian composer Samy Moussa and Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird. In December, Stravinsky’s Petrushka features in a program where the OSM welcomes German violinist Veronika Eberle, whom we will hear in Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 5.
On January 12 and 13, Payare and the OSM will usher in 2027 by welcoming celebrated soprano Renée Fleming, who will perform Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, the product of Fleming’s collaboration with National Geographic. This multimedia concert explores humanity’s relationship with its environment. The first movement of composer-in-residence Jimmy López’s Symphony no. 4 will also be a feature of this concert’s program.
April brings the return of the Mozart Festival, which threads together three different programs. On April 8 and 11, the piano takes center stage as Payare and the OSM join with award-winning performers Charles Richard-Hamelin, Meagan Milatz, and Kevin Chen for a rare event: a performance of the Concerto no. 7 for three pianos. In the week after, Mozart’s vocal and operatic works will take the spotlight, in two programs. First, make way for the Great Mass in C minor, the Exsultate, jubilate and the serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Then, on April 15 and 17, the cycle of Mozart/Da Ponte operas will reach its conclusion with Don Giovanni, featuring, among others, Michèle Lozier, Gustavo Castillo, and Jenny Daviet.
In May, cellist Alisa Weilerstein will join the OSM and Payare in three programs exploring the symphonic imagination of Richard Strauss. Finally, a resounding season finale is planned for May 25 and 26, with Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 and the world premiere of Jimmy López’s Symphony no. 6, “Monarch,” co-commissioned by the OSM and the San Diego Symphony.
“Every new season with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal opens a door on another musical adventure. In 2026–2027, music becomes storytelling, as each work tells its own story, stirs the imagination and draws out the orchestra’s colors. This season promises to be just like Montreal: vibrant, ambitious, teeming with life, and unique. Music invites us to hear the world differently … immerse yourselves in the best it has to offer.”—Rafael Payare, OSM Music Director
Learn more about the full season here.
Rafael Payare is Preludium magazine’s February 2026 cover story ahead of his debut leading the Concertgebouw Orchestra this week. The feature highlights Payare’s musical journey, beginning with his early years as a musician in Venezuela to his rise as leading conductor and music director of both San Diego Symphony and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.
Says Payare of his upcoming debut in Amsterdam:
“I think it’s a fantastic honor. I know the orchestra’s history with Willem Mengelberg and Gustav Mahler. You couldn’t find many recordings in Venezuela, but when we toured with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, we were the first to run to a CD store in every city. A small group of us agreed, ‘If you buy this in Vienna, I’ll buy that in Berlin.’ And then we listened and exchanged experiences.”
Read the full piece here and listen to the Spotify playlist below.
Next season the San Diego Symphony brings 19 programs of orchestral monuments, guest soloists’s show-stopping performances, and an exploration of a world of music of shimmering color and intoxicating rhythms—all designed to share deeply human storytelling through sound. Programming features 13 symphonies, 15 concertos and five solo features, and 15 works new to the San Diego Symphony, including one U.S. premiere.
Works range from the heroic to fantastical, dramatic to atmospheric. Audiences will take sonic journeys to landscapes and waterscapes around the world—North Atlantic seas, Venezuelan plains, Nordic vistas, American prairies, and West Coast Monarch migration paths—and into the dances, songs, stories and cultures of the world, expressed through music. The recently extended contract with Music and Artistic Director Rafael Payare ensures the continuation of his artistic vision and ambitions for the Symphony, shaping the San Diego Sound through an ongoing exploration of the hall’s rich acoustic possibilities. Payare will open and close the season in heroic fashion, conducting Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben on opening weekend and presenting a season finale blockbuster of the U. S. premiere of Jimmy López’ Symphony No. 6, Monarch and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In between, Payare continues his devoted survey of Shostakovich (10th) and Mahler (Sixth) symphonies, and he also leads performances of Bruckner’s Ninth along with works of extraordinary artistic imagination including Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique, Bartok’s The Miraculous Mandarin, Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.
Jimmy López continues the second year of his two-season residency with both the San Diego Symphony and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) as composer-in-residence. The Symphony will perform two of his works: Shift, Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra and his Symphony No. 6, Monarch (2025), co-commissioned by the San Diego Symphony and OSM. Monarch draws inspiration from the migration of monarch butterflies and reflects on the fragile harmony between life and environment.
The San Diego Symphony will perform 15 works for the first time in the orchestra’s history, spanning a wide range of styles and eras: Isaac Albéniz’ Rapsodia española; Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1; Inocente Carreño’s Margariteña; Antonín Dvořák’s The Wood Dove; Alberto Ginastera’s Concierto argentino; Sofia Gubaidulina’s Fairytale Poem; Gideon Klein’s Partita for Strings; Jimmy López’ Shift, Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra, and Symphony No. 6, Monarch (U.S. premiere); Felix Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Op. 27; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Chaconne from Idomeneo; Matthias Pintscher’s Assonanza for Violin and Chamber Orchestra; Francis Poulenc’s Suite from Les biches (The Does); Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane; and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s kínēma.
“The Jacobs Music Center has become a truly inspiring place for our orchestra and community to come together for concerts,” says Payare. “For the 2026-27 season, I am excited to continue this collaboration with the wonderful musicians of the San Diego Symphony—to bring moments of beauty to audiences who have embraced us so warmly. This connection is at the heart of our art form, and I am incredibly grateful and excited to share these incredible orchestral works with our fantastic audiences.”
A San Diego Symphony special presentation of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal will be performed at the Jacobs Music Center on Thursday, October 29 at 8 p.m., led by Music and Artistic Director Rafael Payare, and featuring violinist Leonidas Kavakos. The program opens with Elysium (2021) by Canadian-German composer Samy Moussa, a luminous meditation on the afterlife envisioned as the ultimate reward for an ethical life, followed by Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, one of the repertoire’s most beloved works, renowned for its lyrical beauty, romantic intensity, and dazzling virtuosity. The evening concludes with Stravinsky’s The Firebird, presented in its complete ballet form, promising a richly colored and imaginative night of music.
See the full season schedule here.
In the spring, Rafael Payare makes his Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra debut leading violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann in Frank Martin’s Violin Concerto, on a program with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Fairytale Poem, inspired by Miloš Macourek’s The Little Piece of Chalk (Feb 18, 19). Following these performances, Payare conducts the Shostakovich by itself in the orchestra’s “Essentials” series (Feb 20).
For a return engagement with The Philadelphia Orchestra, Payare leads Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with concertmaster David Kim as the soloist, along with Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo – of which The Philadelphia Orchestra gave the U.S. premiere in 1922 – and pioneering Indigenous American composer Louis Wayne Ballard’s Devil’s Promenade (Feb 5–7).
In March, Payare conducts The Cleveland Orchestra in Miami with members of the New World Symphony. The program of Sibelius and Stravinsky comprises the former composer’s Swan of Tuonela and Violin Concerto in D minor with violinist Sergey Khachatryan as soloist, along with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (March 27, 28).
For Payare’s last U.S. guest appearance of the season, he joins the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and pianist Yulianna Avdeeva for performances of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, sharing the bill with a second interpretation of The Rite of Spring and Jimmy López’s Perú Negro (April 10, 12).
After winter performances of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony in San Diego and the Tenth with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the same composer’s Symphony No. 7 – which Payare also conducts in Montreal this season – is the vehicle for his return to the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, paired with a reprise of Billy Childs’s Diaspora, Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, featuring saxophonist Steven Banks (June 7).
