This spring, Rafael Payare returns to London’s Royal Opera House to lead Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role of Puccini’s Turandot (March 19–April 4). The cast also includes SeokJong Baek as Calaf, Anna Princeva and Gemma Summerfield alternating the role of Liù, and Adam Palka as Timur.
After Payare’s 2023 debut at the Royal Opera House conducting Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, the critics were enthralled, with Bachtrack declaring: “It was light, it was airy, it was enthusiastically accented, it was rhythmically on the nail and it elicited the biggest ovation for an opera overture I can remember – and deservedly so, because it set the scene for an evening of buffa entertainment that never faltered.” The Guardian agreed, finding that Payare’s “perky, pacy reading is full of light and shade, with nimbly sprung rhythms crisp as an iceberg lettuce.”
Find more performance details and tickets here.
The San Diego Symphony and Music Director Rafael Payare have announced the detailed programs of the 2025-26 Jacobs Music Center season. This will be the second season in the orchestra’s new indoor home, a nearly 100-year-old theater that underwent a complete renovation before reopening in 2024 with superior acoustics, beautiful aesthetics and a wide array of works that demonstrate the venue’s new flexible presentation capabilities.
The 2025-26 Jacobs Music Center season will feature 21 programs on the Jacobs Masterworks series, including eight works new to San Diego Symphony, 11 concertos, 19 symphonies, a two-week Brahms Festival, audience favorites, and rarely heard works. Also, as a passionate, renowned champion of Mahler, Payare has programmed two of the composer’s works on the season.
The season opens with Payare leading the orchestra, vocal soloists, and a children’s chorus in a program of French works featuring Maurice Ravel’s one-act opera The Child and the Magical Spells (L’enfant et les sortilèges) directed by the acclaimed British composer and director Gerard McBurney; Claude Debussy’s ballet score The Box of Toys, and his reimagining of an amorous trip to Aphrodite’s birthplace in The Joyful Island (October 3 and 5).
Next, Payare conducts French composer Emmanuel Chabrier’s rhapsody for orchestra, España, coupled with Peruvian composer Jimmy López’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Ephemerae. This work marks the start of López’s two years as Composer-in-Residence. Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 closes the program (October 11-12).
In November, the orchestra performs a selection of Gustav Mahler’s Germanic folk songs The Boy’s Magical Horn, with baritone Matthias Goerne; and Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, titled “Romantic” (November 7 and 8). The next concert opens with Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides and features Augustin Hadelich in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, followed by Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 (November 14-15). Both programs are led by Payare.
The new year kicks off with Payare conducting two symphonies in one concert, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and Shostakovich Symphony No. 8 (January 24-25). In the following program, he leads Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 (January 31 and February 1).
In late February and March, San Diego Symphony begins its two-week Brahms Festival comprising some of the beloved composer’s most iconic pieces offered in four programs conducted by Payare. The festival will feature Brahms’ A German Requiem with vocal soloists Julie Boulianne and Michael Sumuel and the San Diego Symphony Chorus (February 27 and March 1); the Symphonies No. 1 and 2 (February 28); the Violin Concerto with Leonidas Kavakos, and the Symphony No. 4 (March 6); and the Symphony No. 3 with an encore performance of the Violin Concerto (March 7).
Rafael Payare returns in May to lead the Masterworks season’s three final programs: The first one features composer Gabriela Ortiz’s new cello concerto, Dzonot, written for and performed by Alisa Weilerstein; and Richard Strauss’ tone poem, A Hero’s Life (May 9-10). The May 15-16 program features Peru Negro, composed by San Diego Symphony’s new Composer-in-Residence, Jimmy López; followed by Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto with Jeff Thayer, the Deborah Pate and John Forrest Concertmaster Chair of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra; and Mendelssohn Symphony No. 3, “Scottish.” The last concert offers two masterpieces of the late Romantic period: Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, inspired by Nietzsche’s poem; and Bela Bartók’s one-act drama Bluebeard’s Castle, featuring mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill and bass to be announced (May 22 and 24).
For more details, visit sandiegosymphony.org.
Rafael Payare continues his season with the San Diego Symphony at the newly renovated Jacobs Music Center this winter and spring, with particular attention given to their ongoing performances of the complete cycle of the symphonies of Shostakovich and Mahler and the tone poems of Richard Strauss. Rising star pianist Alexander Malofeev joins the orchestra for Prokofiev’s demanding Piano Concerto No. 3. The program begins with the world premiere of Los Angeles-born, Grammy Award-winning composer Billy Childs’s Concerto for Orchestra, and ends with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony (Jan 31; Feb 1). Soon thereafter, Payare conducts the SDS in Strauss’s tone poem Tod und Verklärung (“Death and Transfiguration”), on a program with Brahms’s Second Symphony and William Walton’s Viola Concerto, performed by SDS principal violist Chi-Yuan Chen (Feb 8, 9).
Three more sets of performances round out Payare’s San Diego Symphony season. First he is joined by his wife, celebrated cellist Alisa Weilerstein, for a performance of Unsuk Chin’s Cello Concerto, sharing the program with Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony (May 10, 11). Next, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet is featured in Camille Saint-Saëns’s final Piano Concerto, No. 5, subtitled “The Egyptian.” Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad,” completes the program (May 16, 17). For their season finale, Payare conducts the SDS and mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill in Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor, an expansive ode to nature, humanity, and the splendor of the cosmos that still stands as the longest symphony in the standard repertoire (May 23–25).
Payare also leads a full schedule of winter and spring performances with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Payare and the OSM have just released their latest album on the Pentatone label, a recording of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande and Verklärte Nacht. Payare is in the midst of undertaking the complete cycle of symphonies of Shostakovich and Mahler and tone poems of Richard Strauss with OSM as well, and with that orchestra has already recorded some of those works.
In live performances this winter and spring, the conductor features cellist Alisa Weilerstein in Prokofiev’s Sinfonia concertante (Feb 12, 13); leads Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D with violinist Sergey Khachatryan making his OSM debut, along with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, “The Year 1905” (Feb 19, 20); collaborates with pianist Marc-André Hamelin in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, on a program with jazz-inflected music by George Antheil, John Harbison, and David Schiff (Feb 22); and conducts Mahler’s “Tragic” Sixth Symphony, sharing the bill with Alma Mahler’s Five Songs featuring mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor (Jan 16, 17, 18). A spring Mozart Festival – also marking the beginning of a multi-year cycle of the composer’s three operas with librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte – includes performances of the Requiem (April 16, 17, 18), a semi-staged Così fan tutte (April 23, 25), and the “Jupiter Symphony” paired with Piano Concerto No. 27 featuring Kevin Chen (April 24). The orchestra’s season closes with a work for voices and orchestra sung in Indigenous languages, composed and written by Indigenous and Métis artists Ana Sokolović and Ian Cusson with the intention of protecting disappearing languages by immortalizing them with music, paired with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (May 28–30).
The Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, its Music Director Rafael Payare, and La musique aux enfants have officially launched their El Sistema-inspired program in Montreal. Over the next 5 years, this program will provide intensive and immersive musical education to more than 600 young people aged 6 to 16. Under the aegis of La musique aux enfants, the Programme El Sistema OSM will enable students to learn, in a group setting, to play an orchestral instrument. Since mid-November, the program has taken root in two schools in Montréal-Nord: Saint-Rémi Elementary School and Calixa-Lavallée Secondary School. Participants from two other schools have also joined the program in January: Aux Milles Voix Secondary School and La Fraternité Elementary School.
In addition to instrument lessons, this enriching program includes various musical activities that support the development of social skills, self-discipline, conscientiousness, and teamwork. The program’s young students engage in a learning environment that is immersive, stimulating, and playful, designed to foster their growth, both musically and personally. The project’s aim is to help each child develop their full potential and become self-fulfilled and socially well-integrated adults, whatever route they may choose.
Says Payare: “It has been a dream which is finally taking shape. Without El Sistema, I would neither be the person I am today, nor the artist I have become. This program opened doors for me and enabled me to build a career I could never have imagined. Music should never be a luxury reserved for a privileged few, but a fundamental right, accessible to all, since it has the power to transform lives.”
Under Payare’s leadership, a new chapter begins for transmitting the thrill of music in a spirit of celebration and sharing. This project reflects the OSM’s renewed commitment to collective development, through which every young person can discover the power of music as a means of expression, exchange, and growth, while contributing to a living and inclusive cultural legacy.
This announcement also carries special significance, as the year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of El Sistema in Venezuela. Since its establishment in 1975, over a million young people worldwide have benefitted from El Sistema, which thereby acts as a powerful driver of social development.
Read more about the program here.
