Payare Featured in BBC Music Profile
Jun 13, 2025Journalist Clive Paget wrote a substantial profile of Rafael Payare for the July 2025 issue of BBC Music Magazine.
It was the Viennese critic Hermann Bahr who likened Mahler’s arrival in a hotel lobby to a gust of wind forcing open a window, or water bursting from a pipe. There’s something similarly elemental about Rafael Payare, though in our case we are meeting in a less-than-glamorous back room at the Royal Opera House. The Venezuelan is in town to rehearse Puccini’s Turandot, and despite having had his nose to the ice princess’s grindstone for seven-or-so hours he shows no signs of flagging.
Animated, turbo-charged even (at one point he apologises, entirely unnecessarily, for his own exuberance), Payare marries charm with thoughtfulness. Beneath the luxuriant shock of hair, there’s a calm, bespectacled profile. He laughs a lot – sometimes uproariously – and he’s a perceptive observer of his peers. To complete the Mahlerian analogy, he’s a noted authority on the late-Romantictradition, as evidenced by recent recordings of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande.
