ABOUT RAFAEL PAYARE
Music and Artistic Director

With his innate musicianship, charismatic energy, gift for communication, and irresistibly joyous spirit, conductor Rafael Payare is “considerable grace and considerable swagger, making the two go unusually yet inexorably together” (Los Angeles Times). Payare conducted the San Diego Symphony (SDS) for the first time in 2018 and was subsequently named the orchestra’s music director designate one month later, assuming the role of music director in January 2019. In November 2025 Payare's contract was extended through the 2028-29 season, and he gained a new title: Music and Artistic Director. (Follow this link to learn more!)

Now in the seventh season of his transformative tenure, Payare and the SDS continue their ongoing performances of the complete cycle of symphonies by Shostakovich and Mahler, performing Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony and Mahler’s Seventh. Other highlights include Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony; Beethoven’s First Symphony; Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony; a two-week Brahms festival in the spring encompassing the German Requiem, all four symphonies, and the Violin Concerto performed by Leonidas Kavakos; and Gabriela Ortiz’s new ecology-themed cello concerto, Dzonot, featuring dedicatee Alisa Weilerstein.

The 2025-26 season also marks his fourth as music director of Canada’s Montreal Symphony Orchestra/OSM. With the OSM he leads a similarly full season with Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, followed in October by a Berlioz album release. Other season highlights there include Mahler’s Fourth and Ninth Symphonies; Beethoven’s Piano Concerto featuring Emanuel Ax; Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The conductor rounds out his season with high profile returns to the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, London’s Philharmonia, and the NHK Symphony. He also makes his debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Other current positions are Principal Conductor of Virginia’s Castleton Festival, a post he has held since 2015, and Conductor Laureate of Northern Ireland’s Ulster Orchestra, where he was Principal Conductor and Music Director from 2014-19, making multiple appearances at London’s BBC Proms.

Also a dedicated opera conductor, Payare has made debuts at both London’s Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and the Glyndebourne Festival with Il barbiere di Siviglia and he has led Madama Butterfly and La bohème at Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Opera, Tosca at the Royal Danish Opera, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Castleton Festival, and a new production of La traviata in Malmö, Sweden.

Since winning first prize at Denmark’s Malko Competition for Young Conductors in 2012, Payare has made debuts and forged longstanding relationships with many of the world’s preeminent orchestras. His U.S. collaborations include engagements with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Houston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, and Philadelphia Orchestra, while his notable European appearances include dates with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, and Vienna Philharmonic, which he has led at the Vienna Konzerthaus and Musikverein, on a Baltic tour, and at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.