{"id":142151,"date":"2026-01-20T22:09:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T22:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/142151\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T22:09:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T22:09:10","slug":"with-shostakovich-mahler-concerts-rafael-payare-definies-san-diego-sound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/142151\/","title":{"rendered":"With Shostakovich, Mahler concerts, Rafael Payare definies ‘San Diego sound’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rafael<\/a>Rafael Payare leads the San Diego Symphony Orchestra in the renovated Jacobs Music Center (Photo by Todd Rosenberg\/San Diego Symphony)<\/p>\n

In November, the San Diego Symphony<\/a> signaled its pleasure with music director Rafael Payare by extending his contract to the end of the 2028-29 season and giving him a new, more encompassing title: Music and Artistic Director. As his players mature into their superbly re-voiced hall, Payare\u2019s new mandate amounted to a green light to pursue his vision and ambitions for the orchestra.<\/p>\n

You could not ask for a better statement of both than two upcoming symphony concerts \u2014 Dmitri Shostakovich\u2019s Eighth Symphony (Jan. 24-25) and Gustav Mahler\u2019s Seventh (Jan. 31-Mar. 1). Though programmed months ago, they hint at what a Payare-led symphony means.<\/p>\n

Speaking from Montreal, where he rehearsed Orchestre Symphonique de Montr\u00e9al, Payare sounded pleased with the San Diego Symphony\u2019s progress. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe orchestra is playing wonderfully. It\u2019s in great shape,\u201d he said. \u201cThe beautiful thing is that we have this ability to actually do everything now that we have the new hall. In Jacobs Music Center the way the orchestra is playing, the configuration, the string strength \u2014 the whole hall carries the sound of the string section. The sound is just phenomenal. I think the world should know about the orchestra.\u201d<\/p>\n

Payare alludes to soon-to-be-disclosed projects that will advertise the symphony\u2019s new presence: \u201cPeople will be able to recognize, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s the San Diego Symphony sound\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

With their expansive rosters, high decibel-load sound world, and intricately architected scores, Shostakovich 8 and Mahler 7 are ideal vehicles to show off the symphony\u2019s big new sound.\u00a0 But they also focus sustained spotlights on key soloists. <\/p>\n

Look for bassoon principal Valentin Martchev\u2019s almost narrator-like visibility in the Shostakovich, which also gives him a long solo in the final movement. In the same work, English hornist Andrea Overturf is handed an exposed five-minute solo in the first movement and becomes the voice of lament and desolation in the fourth movement. A week later, the spotlight turns to tenor hornist Kyle Covington who opens Mahler\u2019s sprawling night song with a signature solo while guitarist Tatiana Senderowicz and mandolinist Jing Bowcott inflect the nocturnal serenade in the fourth movement.<\/p>\n

Though Payare has recorded and frequently programmed Berlioz, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg between San Diego and Montreal, Mahler and Shostakovich hover near the center of his artistic ambitions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing that I want to do before my contract expires in 2029 is to actually do the entire cycle of these composers,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are very close to my core repertoire.\u201d <\/p>\n

Their twinned status near the top of Payare\u2019s pantheon is no coincidence. Shostakovich\u2019s esteem for Mahler was absolute. In a letter to a friend he is said to have described Mahler as \u201cthe benchmark of artistic truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of Shostakovich\u2019s fifteen symphonies, Payare has already led the symphony in the Fifth (at Carnegie Hall in 2023), the Seventh (Leningrad, last year), the Eleventh (The Year 1905, in 2020, released on disc), and the Twelfth (The Year 1917, in 2022). Composed a year and a half after the Seventh, the Eighth followed the Soviet Union\u2019s first victory over Germany at Leningrad and was completed during the battle at Kursk, which sealed Germany\u2019s ultimate defeat.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But instead of the triumphant, celebratory symphony Stalin\u2019s culture czars expected, Shostakovich gave them 65 minutes of bleak if beautifully moving music capped not by victory but by hollowed-out survival. Even his friends called it \u201ctragic,\u201d \u201castringent\u201d and \u201cunlikely to be popular.\u201d In 1948 the Soviet Union officially banned it.<\/p>\n

Payare sees the Eighth as proof of Shostakovich\u2019s courageous honesty in the face of state terror, from Gulag sentences to execution. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very dark,\u201d Payare said. \u201c[They were] facing something that is horrible; they were at war. But it was also a requiem for the things that were happening before the war [internally under Stalin]. Shostakovich didn\u2019t want to forget that a lot of people died in the war, but there were a lot of people dying before the war. But you were not allowed to mourn; you could not cry; you were not allowed to be sad. Because [as Shostakovich lamented] \u2018my business is rejoicing.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the thing for Shostakovich: his music looked like there was a mask, but there\u2019s not really a mask. He\u2019s actually saying plain point-blank, and people could either see it or not. That was why he was so nervous. When he was listening to somebody playing his music, he was thinking, \u2018Maybe they will really find out what I\u2019m trying to say. But I will say it anyway.’\u201d<\/p>\n

For his ongoing symphonic cycle of Shostakovich\u2019s touchstone, Mahler, Payare has a specific sequence in mind.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\u201cSince I arrived in the orchestra, I knew that we were going to go through the whole cycle of those composers. We have played already from Mahler, for example, symphonies 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and now that\u2019s going to be 7. Next year, we\u2019re going to do 6, then it\u2019s going to be 9 and 10. The Eighth [Mahler\u2019s mammoth choral Symphony of a Thousand], we\u2019re still trying to figure out when we could be able to do it. But my idea is to do them all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why skip Mahler\u2019s tragic Sixth symphony to do his nocturnal Seventh? <\/p>\n

\u201cThe first five symphonies, they were more, let\u2019s say, joyful and a little bit more optimistic. After the Fifth, everything changes. But I didn\u2019t want to do the Sixth [with its three \u201chammer blows of fate\u201d] first because it\u2019s really bleak. I wanted the orchestra to play the Seventh first because, you know, we need a little bit of light.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLight\u201d may seem an odd way to characterize a symphony nicknamed Song of the Night, which opens with a mournful horn call, and contains a demonic scherzo and two \u201cnachtmusik\u201d (night music)\u00a0movements. But Mahler himself described the Seventh as \u201cprimarily of a cheerful character,\u201d with its serenade-like fourth movement marked \u201candante amoroso\u201d (at a walking pace, lovingly) and a rondo rinale fifth movement in which night finally gives way to day.<\/p>\n

For Payare this last movement is a kind of brilliant distortion of expectations in which \u2014 like Shostakovich more than 35 years later \u2014 things are more than what they seem. Where Shostakovich\u2019s Eighth appears to be only a patriotic war symphony mourning a nation\u2019s military losses, it\u2019s also an indictment of an internal system, Stalinism, that killed as many Russians before the war as Nazis did Russian soldiers in the war.<\/p>\n

Likewise,Mahler intentionally subverts the listener\u2019s sense of what the last movement really is.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe way Mahler worked,\u201d Payare explains, \u201cespecially in the fifth movement [rondo], he was already going into a completely different world, almost like Cubism \u2014 the eyes are supposed to go here, but the mouth it goes a little bit off \u2026 like a Picasso charcoal painting.\u201d <\/p>\n

In other words, the rondo has all the trappings of a classically affirmative last movement \u2014 C major key, outwardly festive fanfares and chorales and a main rondo theme. But that theme sounds suspiciously generic, and the joyousness feels forced. Was this a happy ending that Mahler never intended to feel naturally affirmative? <\/p>\n

Shostakovich\u2019s \u201cmy business is rejoicing\u201d is prefigured in Mahler\u2019s \u201cwill to be happy at all costs\u201d (as Greek-German musicologist Constantin Floros described this rondo). So in 1904-5 Mahler was already composing Cubist symphonies with prismatic meanings \u2014 a skill Shostakovich, trapped in Stalinist Russian, urgently needed to learn well, and did.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though Payare quips that \u201cMahler is very, very Mahler and Shostakovich is very, very Shostakovich,\u201d in their uniqueness he sees a deeper kinship. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn their own way, they are both very truthful, and they just wanted to say that,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if you see the structure of Mahler 7 \u2014 how he put the two nachtmusik with that crazy scherzo in the middle \u2014 it\u2019s like he\u2019s already pushing it,\u201d in ways Shostakovich would refract. \u201cI could talk about Mahler and Shostakovich for weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

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