Rafael Payare

Rafael Payare, born in Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela, in 1980, is one of the most charismatic conductors of his generation, and a product of El Sistema, his country’s famous social music-education programme, where he began as a French horn player (he was a member of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra). He turned to conducting under El Sistema’s founder José Antonio Abreu, won the Malko Competition for young conductors in 2012, and worked closely with mentors including Claudio Abbado and Daniel Barenboim. He has since become music director of the San Diego Symphony and, since 2022, of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Known for the electrifying energy, physical intensity and emotional commitment of his music-making, Payare is especially admired in the big late-Romantic and twentieth-century repertoire, exactly the territory of this programme’s blazing Shostakovich.