Carnegie Hall

Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare is “electrifying in front of an orchestra” (Los Angeles Times). Now in his third season as music director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and his sixth as music director of the San Diego Symphony, he also serves as principal conductor of Virginia’s Castleton Festival and conductor laureate of Northern Ireland’s Ulster Orchestra.

Payare’s San Diego Symphony tenure has been widely hailed as transformative. Highlights include the orchestra’s first Carnegie Hall appearance in a decade, three programs at the inaugural California Festival, star-studded concerts to open The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park and reopen the newly renovated Jacobs Music Center, and a recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11. Payare’s Orchestre symphonique partnership is already proving similarly fruitful. Together, he and the Canadian orchestra have undertaken two major European tours and released three Pentatone albums: an all-Schoenberg recording to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, a pairing of R. Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben with G. Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, and G. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, hailed as an Editor’s Choice in both Gramophone and BBC Music magazines.

Since winning Denmark’s Malko Competition for young conductors, Payare has appeared with many of the world’s preeminent orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestre National de France, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Staatskapelle Berlin, Tonhalle-Orchestre Zürich, and Vienna Philharmonic. As a dedicated opera conductor, he has led productions at the Berlin State Opera, Royal Danish Opera, Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Royal Swedish Opera, and the Castleton and Glyndebourne festivals.

Payare first discovered classical music at age 14, playing horn in El Sistema before studying conducting with the program’s founder, José Antonio Abreu. Today, Payare is himself an inspiration to younger musicians, especially through El Sistema, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, and London’s Royal College of Music. He lives in both San Diego and Montreal with his wife, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and their two young children.

Alisa Weilerstein is one of the foremost cellists of our time. Known for her consummate artistry, emotional investment, and rare interpretive depth, she was recognized with a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship in 2011. Today, her career is truly global in scope, taking her to the most prestigious international venues for solo recitals, chamber concerts, and concerto collaborations.

With her multi-season solo cello project FRAGMENTS, Weilerstein aims to reimagine the concert experience. Comprising six programs, each an hour long, the series sees her weave together the 36 movements of J. S. Bach’s solo cello suites with 27 new commissions in a multisensory production by Elkhanah Pulitzer. In the 2024–2025 season, she premieres FRAGMENTS 3 at San Diego’s Jacobs Music Center, gives the New York premieres of FRAGMENTS 2 and FRAGMENTS 3 at Carnegie Hall, and performs the complete cycle at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival USA.

Weilerstein regularly appears alongside preeminent conductors with the world’s major orchestras. Versatile across the cello repertoire’s full breadth, she is a leading exponent of its greatest classics and an ardent proponent of contemporary music, premiering new concertos by Pascal Dusapin, Matthias Pintscher, and Joan Tower. In 2024–2025, she brings to life new concertos by Thomas Larcher with the New York Philharmonic and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Richard Blackford with the Czech Philharmonic, and Gabriela Ortiz with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Her other 2024–2025 highlights include season-opening concerts with the San Diego and Kansas City symphonies; returns to the Berliner Philharmoniker, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; and duo recitals with Inon Barnatan at Stanford University and the Celebrity Series of Boston.

As an authority on Bach’s music for unaccompanied cello, in spring 2020 Weilerstein released a best-selling recording of his solo suites on the Pentatone label, streamed them in her innovative #36DaysOfBach project, and deconstructed his beloved G-Major Prelude in a Vox.com video, now viewed more than 2.2 million times. Her discography also includes chart-topping albums and the winner of BBC Music’s “Recording of the Year” award.

Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age nine, Weilerstein is a staunch advocate for the T1D community. She lives with her husband, Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, and their two young children.