California Festival, co-led by San Diego Symphony, San Francisco Symphony and L.A. Phil, will celebrate new music<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cI said then that this won\u2019t be a one-time thing and that it should be part of a tradition we will have,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt\u2019s very important to the orchestra that we play there. Tijuana is 20 minutes away from San Diego and we are sharing art there with our friends. The beautiful thing is music has no borders. It\u2019s an international language and a language in its own right.\u201d<\/p>\n
A native of Venezuela who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2024, Payare learned music as a student in his homeland\u2019s free El Sistema, which provides free music instruments and instruction to students in under-resourced communities.<\/p>\n
His first international concert tours were as a French-horn player in Venezuela\u2019s El Sistema-fueled Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar Symphony Orchestra. Its 1995 U.S. tour with the then-15-year-old Payare included concerts at the United Nations in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
By forging closer ties with music students and schools in Baja, Payare and the San Diego Symphony hope to inspire a younger generation of musicians to follow in their footsteps.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur growing relationships with these really gifted students is an opportunity for them to be inspired by Rafael, whose life was forever changed by music,\u201d said Martha Gilmer, the symphony\u2019s president and CEO.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving a bigger dialogue and building greater understanding is something we believe in strongly. Mexico and Canada are our neighbors and San Diego being a border city underscores the importance of our relationship. Music is a connective tissue that strongly bonds us.\u201d<\/p>\n
That connection stretches both north and south.<\/p>\n
Payare\u2019s two upcoming San Diego performances with the Montreal orchestra are part of a three-city California tour that is being partly underwritten by The Royal Bank of Canada. It includes an Oct. 25 concert at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco and an Oct. 27 concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
If all goes as hoped, the San Diego Symphony will perform in Montreal \u2014 with Payare conducting \u2014 in 2028 or 2029.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are working on that,\u201d Payare said. \u201cWe are touring in Europe next year. But in the same way I am doing a West Coast tour in October with the Montreal orchestra, we will do a tour with the San Diego Symphony that includes a concert in Montreal.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a step that should bring them even closer together, the two orchestras have co-commissioned a new work for next year. Entitled \u201cMonarch,\u201d it is being written by Jimmy Lopez, who is the composer-in-residence for both the San Diego and Montreal orchestras. Set to have its U.S. debut next June 4 at Jacobs Music Center, it is named after the monarch butterfly, whose annual migration path extends from Canada and the U.S. to central Mexico.<\/p>\n
\u201cA piece like this is absolutely more significant in these polarized times,\u201d Payare said. \u201cIt\u2019s a way to provide a little hope to people through music.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those sentiments are seconded by Alicia G. Kerber Palma, the Consul General of Mexico in San Diego.<\/p>\n
\u201cCulture is a fundamental tool for humanizing international relations because it allows societies to get to know each other directly and discover the common elements that they share,\u201d said Palma, in a statement released Tuesday by the symphony.<\/p>\n
\u201cMusic demonstrates, perhaps better than any speech, the possibility of building bridges. The San Diego Symphony\u2019s performances in Tijuana and the musical exchanges from Tijuana to San Diego transform the stage into a binational space.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The San Diego Symphony is further expanding its global reach \u2014 just one month after announcing that its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[188060,188058,188059,74,76,75,25937],"class_list":["post-479417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-beyond-borders-initiative","tag-montreal-symphony","tag-rafale-payare","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-san-diego-symphony"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}