5 Minutes with . . . Conductor Rafael Payare

By Laurence Vittes | From the January/February 2025 issue of Strings

The San Diego Symphony marked a transformative milestone this fall with the grand reopening of the extensively renovated Jacobs Music Center on September 28. The renovation has given new life to the historic venue’s acoustics and provided more spacious seating, reconfigured for better sightlines, while meticulously restoring the hall’s architectural details. Under the baton of 44-year-old music director Rafael Payare, the orchestra launched its season with a gala concert featuring an all-star lineup: cellist Alisa Weilerstein, pianist Inon Barnatan, and soprano Hera Hyesang Park. The revitalized venue represents a significant investment in San Diego’s cultural infrastructure, promising to usher in a new era for classical music in the country’s eighth-largest city by population.

The Venezuela–born Payare has emerged as one of classical music’s most dynamic leaders, serving as music director for both the San Diego Symphony since 2019 and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal since 2022. I spoke with Payare a few weeks after the gala, as he was preparing for an innovative program pairing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 with Emanuel Ax and a specially curated suite from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the latter presented as part of an immersive production incorporating visual elements and lighting design.

You started out as a French horn player, like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Edo de Waart. What made you want to be a conductor?

We were on tour with the National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. We were just 150 kids doing things. And then Giuseppe Sinopoli arrived to conduct Mahler One. He did not speak Spanish, but he changed the sound of the orchestra just with his manner—and within seconds. It was amazing. I said, “Wow, I want to do that, but when my hair is white. I need to be really good at my instrument first.”

Who was the person who made it possible?

It was my conducting teacher, Dr. José Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema. He saw me conducting my brass ensemble and said that if I would allow him, he could show me the path into conducting. And since that moment, everything changed for me; it’s when everything made sense, and it was like, wow. And after that I knew this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I don’t come from a rich family, and when I moved to Caracas, my roommate—my ensemble’s tuba player—came from a really underprivileged area. We lived together for years, and we could have world-class conductors like Claudio Abbado or Simon Rattle conduct us. The kids in El Sistema all came to the concerts because Maestro Abreu believed deeply in access for everyone. But it wasn’t about providing a lower-quality product just because the audience came from underprivileged backgrounds. No, no, no. Above everything, it had to be at the highest possible level so that the music would become like a virus, getting into you, making you never stop trying to achieve greater things—not just in music, but in life. While El Sistema is partly a social program, in reality, it’s for everybody, delivering excellence regardless of background.

Are you doing any outreach in San Diego that tries to recreate what you had in Venezuela with El Sistema?

When I arrived in 2019, I wanted to do some kind of El Sistema–inspired project, but then came Covid, then the opening of Rady Shell on the waterfront venue, and now the opening of the hall. We have been reaching out to the youth orchestra system around here, however, because I know how important it is for the community. It’s very important for me because El Sistema was how I got everything. My idea is that we could do something cross-border with Tijuana, which is just 15 minutes away. I know there are also programs south of the border, in Baja California. My idea is that we link together and maybe at the end of the year present them in a joint concert at the Shell. We could have a bi-national kind of thing going on. It’s part of my dreams.

What’s it like being music director of two different orchestras?

In Montréal, the symphony was known for French and Russian repertoire during Charles Dutoit’s tenure (1977–2002), after which Kent Nagano (2006–20) moved it back a bit into the classic repertoire. What I saw in the orchestra was the ability to go deeper into the Germanic kind of sound—Romantic and post-Romantic. That’s why our first recording was Mahler Five and our next was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht and Pelléas und Melisande.

What we have been doing with San Diego is also wonderful. It’s an orchestra that many people do not know—yet. We want people to say that experiencing San Diego is not only about it being 75 degrees and sunny and SeaWorld and all of that, but that it has a great, fantastic orchestra. And now we also have a hall that can become a reference for the music world.

When we last spoke in 2022, you mentioned a five-year plan of programming. How has that vision evolved?

There’s a lot of wonderful music, of course, but there always needs to be a reason why we’re doing it, and what it’s going to entail. For me, it’s not just about what we will play next week or during the next year, but where I want the orchestra to be while bringing the audience with us. It’s like being on a musical Orient Express through many landscapes and cultures.

How do you and your wife, Alisa Weilerstein, manage careers that must involve lots of traveling and days away from home?

It’s about organization. Before Covid, we scheduled 18 months in advance. Then it got a little blurry. Now we are getting back into it. We have a rule between us: we try not to be away from each other for more than two weeks. If we see that there is something that is not going to be great for the family, we try to cancel or to change the dates. We need to do that so we will be able to be together.

How much fun is it to be able to perform the cello concerto repertoire together?

It’s great. Because we know each other very well, of course, not only personally but artistically. We take different risks in concerts and also in rehearsals because we know each other so well. There’s a kind of freedom that is a lot of fun. In fact, we have played all the concertos together except Penderecki and Lutosławski. And next May in San Diego, we will play the Concerto by Unsuk Chin. It’s fantastic.