Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare is “electrifying in front of an orchestra” (Los Angeles Times). Now in his third season as music director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and his sixth as music director of the San Diego Symphony, he also serves as principal conductor of Virginia’s Castleton Festival and conductor laureate of Northern Ireland’s Ulster Orchestra.
Payare’s San Diego Symphony tenure has been widely hailed as transformative. Highlights include the orchestra’s first Carnegie Hall appearance in a decade, three programs at the inaugural California Festival, star-studded concerts to open The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park and reopen the newly renovated Jacobs Music Center, and a recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11. Payare’s Orchestre symphonique partnership is already proving similarly fruitful. Together, he and the Canadian orchestra have undertaken two major European tours and released three Pentatone albums: an all-Schoenberg recording to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, a pairing of R. Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben with G. Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, and G. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, hailed as an Editor’s Choice in both Gramophone and BBC Music magazines.
Since winning Denmark’s Malko Competition for young conductors, Payare has appeared with many of the world’s preeminent orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestre National de France, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Staatskapelle Berlin, Tonhalle-Orchestre Zürich, and Vienna Philharmonic. As a dedicated opera conductor, he has led productions at the Berlin State Opera, Royal Danish Opera, Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Royal Swedish Opera, and the Castleton and Glyndebourne festivals.
Payare first discovered classical music at age 14, playing horn in El Sistema before studying conducting with the program’s founder, José Antonio Abreu. Today, Payare is himself an inspiration to younger musicians, especially through El Sistema, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, and London’s Royal College of Music. He lives in both San Diego and Montreal with his wife, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and their two young children.
