In their seven seasons together, San Diego Symphony CEO Martha Gilmer and Music/Artistic Director Rafael Payare have repeatedly stated a shared goal: to push their orchestra, California’s oldest, up the quality curve.
In announcing the 2026-2027 programming, their eighth co-curated season, Gilmer framed it directly: “This season has been created to inspire our orchestra… to perform at an increasingly high level.” Payare is scheduled to lead eight orchestral weekends himself.
But how to do that in a mid-tier classical music market with temperate, if eclectic, tastes? By shrewdly threading a needle between main-canon anchor works and a blend of new, or less-familiar, works and local-debut artists.
Sixteen of the Symphony’s 20 weekends conclude with welcoming core-repertoire masterpieces, from symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven, and Gustav Mahler to Dmitri Shostakovich, Jean Sibelius, and Richard Strauss, among others. Big-name and/or familiar soloists — like Yefim Bronfman, Daniil Trifonov, and Alisa Weilerstein — further sweeten the audience appeal. There’s even an all-Mozart weekend.
The aforementioned curatorial balance is hinted at in the three weekends without these familiar anchors. For example, an October program substitutes the canonical anchor with four French bonnes saveurs and composer-in-residence Jimmy López’s trombone concerto, “Shift.” An April weekend places Sergei Prokofiev’s less-familiar seventh symphony against a pleasing Antonín Dvořák symphonic poem and Leoš Janáček’s graphically jagged “Taras Bulba.” A May program features Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä offsetting Edvard Grieg’s familiar piano concerto with an unsung twentieth-century masterpiece, Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony.
Stir in fifteen works never-before performed by the orchestra — including Béla Bartók's first Violin Concerto, Sofia Gubaidulina's “Poema-Skazka,” and Esa-Pekka Salonen's “kínēma” — and Gilmer and Payare’s strike-a-balance strategy begins to shine.
Two of the Symphony’s scheduled premieres are by López. They are “Shift” and Monarch, the composer’s sixth symphony. Monarch is co-commissioned by Payare’s two orchestras (San Diego and Montreal), and dedicated to Payare. “He was the one who challenged me to take inspiration from the theme of immigration,” López explained.
Rounding out the season’s leavening novelty are a guest appearance by Payare’s Orchestra Symphonique de Montréal and San Diego Symphony debuts by six conductors and nine soloists. Three Symphony-sponsored jazz weekends (focusing on Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and Lee Morgan) affirm San Diego’s flair for threading the programming needle
