ABOUT RAFAEL PAYARE
Music and Artistic Director

With his charismatic energy, innate musicianship, and technical brilliance on the podium, Rafael Payare is always “electrifying in front of an orchestra” (Los Angeles Times). Since September 2019, he has been music and artistic director of California’s San Diego Symphony Orchestra, where he is widely credited with inspiring “the San Diego Symphony’s splendid new sound” (Wall Street Journal).

Payare has helped usher in a bright new era for the San Diego Symphony. He and the orchestra drew international notice with the openings of The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, their bayside open-air venue, and Jacobs Music Center, their newly renovated indoor home, where the Symphony “finally has a San Diego venue that permits it to sound like the world-class orchestra they’ve been since Payare took over” (San Diego Union-Tribune). In recent seasons, the Orchestra has presented festival programming including two weeks dedicated to Brahms and “It’s About Time,” a focus on percussion that included performances on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Works by Brahms, Mahler, Bruckner, and Shostakovich are featured every season with Payare. The Orchestra regularly programs new music by composers including Matthias Pintscher and Gabriela Ortiz, and recently commissioned Symphony No. 6: Monarch by San Diego Symphony composer-in-residence Jimmy López. In 2023, Payare joined Gustavo Dudamel and Esa-Pekka Salonen to launch the first California Festival, a statewide celebration of contemporary music featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and San Diego Symphony. On a 2026 Delos release, Payare conducts the San Diego Symphony Orchestra in Shostakovich’s epic seventh symphony, “Leningrad,” following the success of their digital recording of the same composer’s Symphony No. 11. He also leads the Orchestra on its first European tour in 2027, with performances in Barcelona, Dublin, Hamburg, Paris, and Toulouse. Another of his key initiatives includes the San Diego Symphony Conducting Fellowship Program, conceived to cultivate the next generation of orchestral leaders.

Beyond San Diego, Payare is music and artistic director of Canada’s Orchestre symphonique de Montréal—with which he has made four Pentatone recordings and numerous appearances on Medici.tv—and Conductor Laureate of Northern Ireland’s Ulster Orchestra, where he previously served as Principal Conductor and Music Director, making multiple appearances at London’s BBC Proms. Since winning first prize at Denmark’s 2012 Malko Competition for Young Conductors, he has forged relationships with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh Symphonies; the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras; and the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics; the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Staatskapelle Berlin, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, and Vienna Philharmonic. He has also led productions at London’s Royal Opera House, the Glyndebourne Festival, Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Opera, and the Royal Danish Opera.

An alumnus of Venezuela’s El Sistema program, Payare founded Montreal’s El Sistema OSM. He has led youth projects with the Chicago Civic Orchestra, Orchestra of the Americas, Filarmónica Joven de Colombia, and London’s Royal College of Music, and has conducted the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland on tour and lead NYO2 at Carnegie Hall and the Edinburgh Festival.

Payare lives in San Diego and Montreal with his wife, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and their two children.