In November, the San Diego Symphony 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’s new mandate amounted to a green light to pursue his vision and ambitions for the orchestra.
You could not ask for a better statement of both than two upcoming symphony concerts — Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony (Jan. 24-25) and Gustav Mahler’s Seventh (Jan. 31-Mar. 1). Though programmed months ago, they hint at what a Payare-led symphony means.
Speaking from Montreal, where he rehearsed Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Payare sounded pleased with the San Diego Symphony’s progress.
“The orchestra is playing wonderfully. It’s in great shape,” he said. “The 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 — the whole hall carries the sound of the string section. The sound is just phenomenal. I think the world should know about the orchestra.”
Payare alludes to soon-to-be-disclosed projects that will advertise the symphony’s new presence: “People will be able to recognize, ‘Oh, that’s the San Diego Symphony sound’.”
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’s big new sound. But they also focus sustained spotlights on key soloists.
Look for bassoon principal Valentin Martchev’s 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’s sprawling night song with a signature solo while guitarist Tatiana Senderowicz and mandolinist Jing Bowcott inflect the nocturnal serenade in the fourth movement.
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.
“The thing that I want to do before my contract expires in 2029 is to actually do the entire cycle of these composers,” he said. “They are very close to my core repertoire.”
Their twinned status near the top of Payare’s pantheon is no coincidence. Shostakovich’s esteem for Mahler was absolute. In a letter to a friend he is said to have described Mahler as “the benchmark of artistic truth.”
Of Shostakovich’s 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’s first victory over Germany at Leningrad and was completed during the battle at Kursk, which sealed Germany’s ultimate defeat.
But instead of the triumphant, celebratory symphony Stalin’s 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 “tragic,” “astringent” and “unlikely to be popular.” In 1948 the Soviet Union officially banned it.
Payare sees the Eighth as proof of Shostakovich’s courageous honesty in the face of state terror, from Gulag sentences to execution.
“It’s very dark,” Payare said. “[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’t 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] ‘my business is rejoicing.'”
“That was the thing for Shostakovich: his music looked like there was a mask, but there’s not really a mask. He’s 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, ‘Maybe they will really find out what I’m trying to say. But I will say it anyway.'”
For his ongoing symphonic cycle of Shostakovich’s touchstone, Mahler, Payare has a specific sequence in mind.
“Since 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’s going to be 7. Next year, we’re going to do 6, then it’s going to be 9 and 10. The Eighth [Mahler’s mammoth choral Symphony of a Thousand], we’re still trying to figure out when we could be able to do it. But my idea is to do them all.”
Why skip Mahler’s tragic Sixth symphony to do his nocturnal Seventh?
“The first five symphonies, they were more, let’s say, joyful and a little bit more optimistic. After the Fifth, everything changes. But I didn’t want to do the Sixth [with its three “hammer blows of fate”] first because it’s really bleak. I wanted the orchestra to play the Seventh first because, you know, we need a little bit of light.”
“Light” 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 “nachtmusik” (night music) movements. But Mahler himself described the Seventh as “primarily of a cheerful character,” with its serenade-like fourth movement marked “andante amoroso” (at a walking pace, lovingly) and a rondo rinale fifth movement in which night finally gives way to day.
For Payare this last movement is a kind of brilliant distortion of expectations in which — like Shostakovich more than 35 years later — things are more than what they seem. Where Shostakovich’s Eighth appears to be only a patriotic war symphony mourning a nation’s military losses, it’s also an indictment of an internal system, Stalinism, that killed as many Russians before the war as Nazis did Russian soldiers in the war.
Likewise,Mahler intentionally subverts the listener’s sense of what the last movement really is.
“The way Mahler worked,” Payare explains, “especially in the fifth movement [rondo], he was already going into a completely different world, almost like Cubism — the eyes are supposed to go here, but the mouth it goes a little bit off … like a Picasso charcoal painting.”
In other words, the rondo has all the trappings of a classically affirmative last movement — 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?
Shostakovich’s “my business is rejoicing” is prefigured in Mahler’s “will to be happy at all costs” (as Greek-German musicologist Constantin Floros described this rondo). So in 1904-5 Mahler was already composing Cubist symphonies with prismatic meanings — a skill Shostakovich, trapped in Stalinist Russian, urgently needed to learn well, and did.
Though Payare quips that “Mahler is very, very Mahler and Shostakovich is very, very Shostakovich,” in their uniqueness he sees a deeper kinship.
“In their own way, they are both very truthful, and they just wanted to say that,” he said. “And if you see the structure of Mahler 7 — how he put the two nachtmusik with that crazy scherzo in the middle — it’s like he’s already pushing it,” in ways Shostakovich would refract. “I could talk about Mahler and Shostakovich for weeks.”
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