No. 2050 Subscription (Program B)

With his innate musicianship, charismatic energy, gift for communication and irresistibly joyous spirit, Rafael Payare is “electrifying in front of an orchestra” (Los Angeles Times). Currently, he is Music Director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and the San Diego Symphony, Principal Conductor of Virginia’s Castleton Festival and Conductor Laureate of Northern Ireland’s Ulster Orchestra.
Born in Venezuela in 1980, he first discovered classical music at age 14, when he began playing horn with the country’s El Sistema program. From 2001 to 2012 he served as Principal Horn of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, taking part in tours and recordings with Gustavo Dudamel and other eminent conductors including Claudio Abbado, Lorin Maazel, Simon Rattle, and Giuseppe Sinopoli, who first inspired him to conduct himself. Receiving conducting training from El Sistema founder José Antonio Abreu and subsequent mentors Maazel and Krzysztof Penderecki, he went on to lead all of Venezuela’s major orchestras.
The first prize winner at the Denmark’s Malko Competition for Young Conductors in 2012, he has made debuts and forged long-standing relationships with many of the world’s preeminent orchestras, opera houses and festivals, including the Wiener Philharmoniker, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Staatskapelle Berlin, London Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Royal Opera House, Staatsoper Berlin, BBC Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival.
He made his NHK Symphony Orchestra debut in the summer of 2017 before his first appearance as its subscription concert in 2020 with an all Shostakovich program. For their coming collaboration, he will give an Austro-German program featuring Mozart, Schumann and Richard Strauss, alongside the pianist Emanuel Ax who served as the soloist at Payare’s sensational New York Philharmonic debut in 2022.

Born in 1949 to Polish parents in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada with his family when he was a young boy. He made his New York debut in the Young Concert Artists Series, and in 1974 won the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize.
One of the most sought-after soloists, he has shared the stage with the world’s foremost orchestras. An enthusiastic chamber musician as well, his trio with Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma launched an ambitious, multi-year project to record all the Beethoven trios and symphonies arranged for trio.
He has received Grammy Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas, and for a series of recordings with Yo-Yo Ma of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. His last visit to Japan was in November 2015 but these concerts will be his first appearance with the NHK Symphony Orchestra since June 2002, when he performed Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 under the baton of Charles Dutoit, then the orchestra’s Music Director.