Winter & Spring Season Highlights with San Diego Symphony and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal

Feb 1, 2025

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).