Our prime "begin your weekend" series of 5 Friday nights of classical music at Jacobs Music Center, including Mahler's "Tragic" Symphony No. 6, Sibelius' Symphony No. 2, Elgar's Cello Concerto, Debussy's La mer and more!
Voices of Destiny: Liszt’s Concerto and Mahler’s 6th
Friday, November 20, 7:30 PM
Rafael Payare, conductor
Inon Barnatan, piano
LISZT: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major
MAHLER: Symphony No. 6 in A minor, “Tragic”
Read the Program Notes for this concert.
San Diego favorites Rafael Payare and pianist Inon Barnatan join forces for two Romantic masterpieces that confront the power of Fate. In an era when science was reshaping humanity’s understanding of the universe, artists like Liszt and Mahler turned inward, exploring the mystery of destiny and the courage required to face it.
Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 unfolds like an opera without words – its soloist cast as the hero in a drama of triumph and struggle. Once the most celebrated virtuoso in Europe, Liszt used dazzling technique and vivid theatricality to create music that pushed the piano to visionary extremes. Barnatan embodies the concerto’s hero, alternately bold and lyrical amid waves of orchestral color.
Written half a century later, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 expands this Romantic struggle into an epic. Quoting Liszt’s concerto near its opening, Mahler acknowledges his predecessor while plunging deeper into questions of destiny, mortality, and meaning. Scored for colossal forces – complete with the infamous “hammer blows of fate” – the symphony unfolds as an immense human tragedy. Mahler’s “Tragic” is both homage and prophecy: a portrait of heroism facing a collapsing world and a moving testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Youthful Visions: Carreño, Prokofiev & Sibelius
Friday, December 4, 7:30 PM
Diego Matheuz, conductor
Aristo Sham, piano
CARREÑO: Margariteña
PROKOFIEV: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16
SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43
Read the Program Notes for this concert.
December opens with a captivating program of innovation and imagination, featuring music by Carreño, Prokofiev, and Sibelius – three composers who captured the spirit of change at the dawn of the 20th century.
Inocente Carreño’s Margariteña, a radiant “symphonic gloss” from the 1950s, celebrates the Venezuelan composer’s Caribbean homeland. Drawing on popular melodies, including his beloved song “Margarita es una lágrima,” the piece glows with the warmth and rhythm of island life.
Next, pianist Aristo Sham performs Prokofiev’s electrifying Piano Concerto No. 2, written when the composer was just 21. Its explosive rhythms, haunting lyricism, and sheer virtuosity shocked early audiences but revealed a bold new musical language. Reconstructed from memory after the original score was destroyed, the concerto stands among Prokofiev’s most thrilling creations.
The concert concludes with Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, a defining work in the Finnish composer’s evolution from Romantic opulence to taut modern mastery. Built from fragments that gradually coalesce into sweeping melodies, it mirrors the growth of an idea – from uncertainty to radiant triumph. Its closing pages, among the most inspiring in all symphonic music, affirm the power of persistence, transformation, and hope.
Alisa Weilerstein Plays Elgar’s Cello Concerto
Friday, January 29, 7:30 PM
Rafael Payare, conductor
Alisa Weilerstein, cello
ELGAR: Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85
BERLIOZ: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14
This concert pairs two masterpieces written at opposite ends of their composers’ careers: Elgar’s elegiac Cello Concerto and Berlioz’s audacious Symphonie fantastique.
Edward Elgar’s concerto, composed in 1919 as the shadow of World War I lifted, stands as his final great work. Gone is the imperial grandeur of his earlier music; in its place is intimacy and reflection. Written in the quiet of the English countryside – where distant gunfire from France was still faintly audible – the concerto mourns loss yet affirms the power of music to heal. Today, it remains one of the most beloved works in the cello repertoire, and Alisa Weilerstein continues its long tradition of great interpreters.
Nearly a century earlier, a fearless young Hector Berlioz shocked Paris with his Symphonie fantastique (1830). This revolutionary work broke every rule of symphonic form, telling the feverish, semi autobiographical tale of a tormented artist haunted by love, opium dreams, and visions of his own execution and demonic revels. With astonishing imagination and orchestral innovation, Berlioz expanded the possibilities of musical storytelling.
Together, these two works rise from personal passion – one inward and elegiac, the other wild and visionary – revealing music’s ability to express both the deepest grief and the most fantastic imagination.
Music of Sea and Story: La mer and Shéhérazade
Friday, March 5, 7:30 PM
Edward Gardner, conductor
Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano
MENDELSSOHN: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Op. 27
TCHAIKOVSKY: The Tempest Fantasy-Overture, Op. 18
RAVEL: Shéhérazade
DEBUSSY: La mer
British conductor Edward Gardner leads a vivid, ocean themed program exploring humanity’s eternal fascination with the sea – its stillness, storms, and mystery.
Mendelssohn’s youthful concert overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, inspired by Goethe’s poem, captures the peril of a ship becalmed with no wind to move it – an image of both physical and spiritual stagnation. A breath of air stirs, the sails fill, and the music surges with joyful momentum toward open waters.
Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest, after Shakespeare, transforms Prospero’s magical island into a world of tempest and tenderness, combining tempestuous storms with luminous love music for Miranda and Ferdinand before peace is restored.
Ravel’s sumptuous Shéhérazade, based on orientalist poems, evokes exotic voyages and sensual dreamscapes through glowing orchestral color and the voice’s seductive allure.
Debussy’s La mer, perhaps the most famous musical portrait of the sea, closes the program. Its three movements – From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, Play of the Waves, and Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea – trace the ocean’s transformations from calm to tempest and serenity again. For Debussy, the sea becomes both natural and human – vast, unpredictable, and deeply emotional.
Ode to Humanity: Beethoven’s 9th and López’s Monarch
Friday, June 4, 7:30 PM
Rafael Payare, conductor
Tasha Hokuao Koontz, soprano
Nikola Printz, mezzo-soprano
Viktor Antipenko, tenor
Hansung Yoo, baritone
JIMMY LÓPEZ: Symphony No. 6, Monarch
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, “Choral”
Two symphonies – one newly written, one timeless – come together in a celebration of nature, humanity, and hope.
Peruvian born composer and San Diego Symphony Composer in Residence Jimmy López draws inspiration from the natural world that unites the Americas along the Pacific coast. In his Symphony No. 6, Monarch, he turns to one of nature’s most wondrous phenomena: the migration of monarch butterflies. López transforms their journey into sound—a vivid meditation on transformation, endurance, and the fragile harmony between life and environment.
The program culminates with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, a work that forever changed the symphonic form with its visionary finale setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy. Written in defiance of personal struggle, the work transcends boundaries of time and culture, uniting orchestra, chorus, and audience in a single voice of exaltation. Its words and music – celebrating joy, brotherhood, and freedom – remain an anthem of shared humanity.
Together, these two symphonies embody an unbroken continuum: López’s reflection on nature’s resilience and Beethoven’s immortal affirmation of the human spirit. In both, we are reminded of music’s power to lift us beyond division and reconnect us to wonder.
