Fall Highlights: The Inauguration of San Diego’s newly renovated Jacobs Music Center with San Diego Symphony, European tour with Orchestre symphonique de Montréal & Guest Engagement with NY Phil
Sep 3, 2024Rafael Payare embarks on a banner season in 2024–25 as Music Director of California’s San Diego Symphony (SDSO) and Canada’s Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (Montreal Symphony Orchestra/OSM). Payare inaugurates San Diego’s newly renovated Jacobs Music Center with an Opening Night concert featuring pianist Inon Barnatan, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, SDSO concertmaster Jeff Thayer, and Korean soprano Hera Hyesang-Park as soloists, plus a world premiere composed for the occasion by Texu Kim (Sep 28).
Payare continues his fall season in San Diego with three separate programs in the month of October. The first features the San Diego Symphony co-commissioned Time by Austrian composer Thomas Larcher sharing the bill with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”), the latter featuring soprano Angela Meade and mezzo-soprano Anna Larsson and marking the debut of the San Diego Symphony Festival Chorus (Oct 4–6). The following week, Payare and the orchestra return with a program that juxtaposes Brahms’s sole Violin Concerto – performed by celebrated young Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan – with Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, in recognition of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth (Oct 12, 13). Yet another unique program is presented the week after that, when Payare and the SDS are joined by Emanuel Ax for a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in C, paired with a new musical-theatrical reimagining of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet that incorporates projections and Shakespeare’s original text, directed by Gerard McBurney (Oct 18–20).
An all-Schoenberg album that includes Pelleas und Melisande and Verklärte Nacht and marks Payare and the OSM’s third on Pentatone is due for release in October. Anticipating the new album, Payare and the OSM open their season in Montreal with performances of Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder featuring soprano Dorothea Röschmann, tenor Clay Hilley, mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill, tenor Stephan Rügamer, baritone Thomas E. Bauer, and tenor Ben Heppner performing the sprechstimme role. The September 13 performance – falling on Schoenberg’s exact birthday – will be broadcast live on Mezzo, celebrating ten years of partnership with the orchestra (Sep 11, 13). Other upcoming highlights of Payare and the OSM’s season in Montreal include the world premiere of an OSM-commissioned work by Canadian composer Michael Oesterle (Sep 18, 19); an all-Latin American program featuring OSM principal trumpet Paul Merkelo (Nov 6, 7); and pianist Bruce Liu playing Scriabin’s sole Piano Concerto ((Nov 13, 14).
Celebrated Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov joins Payare and the OSM for performances of Schumann’s Piano Concerto (Sep 18) and Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto (Sep 19) in Montreal as a lead-in to a high-profile European tour the following month (Nov 19–30). Focusing on cultural capitals, the tour takes in London, Luxembourg, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Munich, and Vienna. On tour, Trifonov performs the Schumann and Beethoven concertos in repertory, with other rotating repertoire including Iranian-Canadian composer Iman Habibi’s reflection on the climate crisis, Jeder Baum spricht (“Every tree speaks”), also composed to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday; Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture and Symphonie fantastique; and Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony.
Also in high demand as a guest conductor, this fall Payare returns to the New York Philharmonic to lead Anthony McGill in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony, and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Fairytale Poem, inspired by Miloš Macourek’s The Little Piece of Chalk, an allegory of artistic perseverance (Oct 23–25).
