San Diego Symphony Offers New Monthly Online Concerts Starting January 29

Since San Diego Symphony audiences cannot gather in Copley Symphony Hall during the current COVID-19 pandemic, the orchestra has decided to bring Symphony Hall performances to its fans online. From January to May 2021, the San Diego Symphony will livestream monthly virtual orchestral concerts featuring Music Director Rafael Payare and San Diego Symphony musicians.The first of these monthly concerts will be offered for at-home viewing on January 29 at 7:00 p.m., a program titled Wagner meets Mozart.

Maestro Payere will open this January concert with the orchestra’s mighty brass sections playing the stately Prelude to Act III from Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, followed by the moving “Siegfried’s Funeral March” from Götterdämmerung, the final opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.  Then the oboes and horns will join the orchestra’s string sections in Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 in A Major, K. 201, one of the composer’s most charming early symphonic works.

On February 26 at 7:000 p.m., Payare will lead the strings in Tchaikovsky’s evergreen Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48, complemented by Mozart’s Serenade in C Minor, K. 388, written for eight winds. Mozart’s canonic third movement of the Serenade is a tribute to the Baroque masters Bach and Handel, and Mozart thought so highly of this work that he also made an arrangement of it for string quintet, K. 406.

Payare will also introduce contemporary American composer Carlos Simon’s “Elegy: A Cry from the Grave,” written in memory of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Winner of the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, Simon is a member of the Georgetown University music faculty.

These high-quality online productions—currently scheduled to air the final Friday of the month January through May—feature outstanding sound quality and breathtaking images captured by multiple video cameras stationed throughout Copley Symphony Hall at the Jacobs Music Center.

All Access Passes as well as access to individual programs are available for purchase at the San Diego Symphony website starting January 21: www.sandiegosymphony.org/digitalpass.