San Diego Symphony & Payare Announce 2nd Season at Newly Transformed Jacobs Music Center

Feb 4, 2025

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.

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