Rafael Payare, music director for the San Diego Symphony, has conducted orchestras all over the world, but his approach always remains the same, no matter the location.
“I go all in, or nothing. Completely,” Payare said in an interview with the Name Drop San Diego podcast. “If the piece is devastating, I am completely devastated.”
That will also be true of his performances for the debut at The Shell at Jacobs Park as it opens for the summer 2021 season and he conducts with the San Diego Bay in view. Payare began the role of music director in 2019 and signed on to continue through the 2025-26 season.
The Venezuelan conductor was also recently announced as the music director for Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM). He will work with the two orchestras in different multi-week stints over the years.
Read excerpts of the conversation below or listen to the full episode in the podcast player above or on your favorite listening apps including these:
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On the debut of the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park:
Oh, it’s phenomenal. We are super, super excited about The Shell, because I mean, it looks fantastic. … Sometimes I go to Coronado to take my daughter to Tidelands Park with her scooter, and you see it from afar. It’s so beautiful. But actually, when you get on stage, it’s just phenomenal. It has this fantastic ability. They put this [Meyer Constellation Acoustic System] on stage. So the feeling when we are actually on stage is like, we are in an indoor concert hall. So everybody could hear each other … even though we’re in the beautiful outdoors with a bay by the side, having the water all 180 degrees or even a little bit more, and then you feel like you’re inside a concert hall. And you can do, with all the musicians, the different soft dynamics or loud dynamics, whatever we want. So it’s just outstanding. Maybe I’m a little biased. No, I’m not. But it’s for real. It’s really, really amazing, the sound.
On how San Diego compares to orchestras he has conducted around the world:
Well, the beautiful thing with San Diego is that the orchestra is outstanding. The artists are really, really good. And I think that not everybody knows how great this orchestra is. And this is one of the things that also, we want, when I came in here. This is an orchestra that everybody should be talking about because the finesse, the virtuosity, the flexibility that they have for any kind of genre that we approach is fantastic. So, it is good that more and more people are like, “Oh my God. Is that happening? In San Diego? Really? I had no idea!” So it’s wonderful to kind of burst the bubble for many people outside. … Somehow it is happening at the same time with the Padres, you know? And now, more and more, everybody’s just looking at us like, oh, yeah, yeah yeah! We’re not messing around. You should really pay attention to what’s going on in here. And it’s beautiful to do and to, let’s say, inform people of the absolutely highest standard and wonderful level of music making that we have in here.
On being a Padres fan:
I love baseball. In Venezuela, baseball is really, really big. I had not been able — living in Europe — to really follow everything, and now that I have, you know, a home here in San Diego, I’m really happy that I could go with my hometown team. So I’m very happy now. And I was following the Padres many years ago because, in my hometown, Puerto La Cruz, Barcelona, in Venezuela, the team there is called Caribes, and there was kind of like the [Fernando] Tatis Jr. of Caribes in there. It was this amazing player called Alexi Amarista. He was playing with the Padres maybe eight or nine years ago. So there’s this strange connection from many years ago that I didn’t know that I was going to end up here. So the love for the Padres has been already there for a while.
