I’m sat, spent dessert plates before me at Bouillon Bilk’s bar, still buzzing from my 15 minutes with Rafael Payare, the superstar Venezuelan Maestro who in 2022 was tapped to lead the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal into its ninth decade as this city’s most esteemed musical institution.

An extravagant lunch in a place I can’t afford seems like the only fitting way to follow a spirited dialogue with such an inspired individual.

So, too, is Payare a luxury nearly too dear for this city, a musician of rare, exquisite skill and enthusiasm that it overflows — akin to the unruly mop of curly black locks that spring from his head. Watching Payare conduct an orchestra, his lithe figure oscillating like a vertical sound wave, is as exhilarating as any thrill ride.

I’m fortunate to have been granted a conversation with this man because, unlike fame, not everyone gets their 15 minutes. I confide in the waitress, unable to contain my elation, that I have just come from interviewing Payare.

“Oh yeah, he’s been in here,” she confesses.

Of course he has, clearly an artist with an appetite for the best of everything — music, cities, beauty, food. For all of the above, Montreal is doubtless a veritable horn of plenty.

“I love to eat,” Payare tells me, back in his dressing room at Maison Symphonique, his eyes wide from behind frameless spectacles. “The food in Montreal is fantastic, and you have so many different choices.”

With just a quarter hour to spare, I almost regret starting out by asking Payare what he’s particularly looking forward to in the OSM’s 2024-2025 season, announced at a press conference last Tuesday.

“We’re going to start with Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lider,” he grins. “Funnily enough, the second concert of Gurre-Lider happens exactly at the 150^th birthday of Schoenberg, September 13^th. It wasn’t like we aimed it that way; everything just aligned, and that’s wonderful.”

“We want to do a trilogy of the Mozart operas with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Then, we are going to go on a tour — we’re travelling to Europe for eight different cities: Paris, London, Luxembourg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. It’s just fantastic.”

Unprompted, he continues, “Of course, we’re going to keep exploring the cycle of Mahler. We’re going to be playing the Sixth and ending the season with Song of the Earth. We have this idea of trying to help the languages from people — Indigenous people — that are going extinct. So, our idea will be to get some poems in those languages and set them to music to help the perpetuity of that language, so it doesn’t disappear. That’s just grosso modo.”

Payare is equally expressive when he conducts as when he speaks, gesturing manually, or drumming the table, or making onomatopoeic noises when he can’t quite find the right word.

He recounts some of his earliest transformative musical experiences. Payare’s brother, Joel, a bassoonist eight years his senior, once was listening at home to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

“The sound that caught my attention was when the horns played, ‘bom bom bom bom,’” Payare bellows.

Another instance was when the legendary Italian conductor, Giuseppe Sinopoli, stepped in to lead Payare and 150 other kids of El Sistema, the publicly funded Venezuelan music education programme, in the final movement of Mahler’s First Symphony.

“The sound of the orchestra just changed completely. I was like, what is going on?” Payare mimes an expanding bang with his hands and mimics an explosion sound.

Founded in 1975 by Maestro José Antonio Abreu, El Sistema was Payare’s entry point into a musical universe.

“In Venezuela, there was no classical music radio,” Payare laments. “There was an AM radio programme that you could hear from six to seven. Who is awake from six to seven in the morning? I mean, come on. To this day, they haven’t fixed that.”

With little domestic encouragement, Payare got a comparatively late start as a musician, picking up the French Horn at the age of 14.

“In Venezuela, you had a lot of Joropo, a lot of Merengue, a lot of Salsa,” he recalls. “Of course, from outside, you could hear Rock & Roll and all those things. The beautiful thing about music is that you don’t need to know anything. You just hear it, and you feel it. That’s it. It’s just wonderful. It’s like air.”

Still, it was his association with El Sistema — and classical music’s structure — that resonated most with Payare. “It’s not a conservatory, it’s not a university,” he explains.

“We call it ‘nucleus’ because you not only receive all the theory and the classes of your instrument there, but you start playing in an orchestra. One of the things that was always a motto of Maestro Abreu’s was that music should not be a privilege; it should be a right. When you have music in your life, it helps you be a better human being. If you have the sense of playing in an orchestra, you know that you are not the most important thing. Sometimes you have to tune, you have to hear, you have to harmonize. If you apply that to life, it will be a little less complicated.”

Payare is nonetheless a natural leader, graduating from El Sistema in the early 2000s, and quickly rising to win first prize in May 2012 at the Malko Competition for Young Conductors; becoming assistant conductor to Claudio Abbado with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, and to Daniel Barenboim at the Staatsoper Berlin; guest-conducting the Ulster Orchestra in 2013, and later being appointed as their chief conductor and musical director from 2014 to 2019; succeeding Lorin Maazel following his death in 2014 as principal conductor at the Castleton Festival in Virginia; and most recently, as the San Diego Symphony’s music director.

“I have music going on in my head all the time,” Payare divulges. “It’s something that goes and goes and goes. You see it. Music is a live organism, as we know. And never, never are two concerts the same. It’s funny, especially with an orchestra like Montreal’s — that’s why I love them so much — it’s like having a great dance partner.”

Payare’s partner in life is the celebrated cellist, Alisa Weilerstein, a member of the OSM who will be performing the Sinfonia Concertante by Prokofiev in the forthcoming season.

Of that work, Payare claims: “It requires a cellist that needs to be outstanding for the piece to be able to speak. And I’m not saying that because she’s my wife, but that’s her piece. It’s really meant for her.” He laughs. “I’m not biased at all.”

Bias notwithstanding, Payare and Weilerstein are invaluable additions to the cultural mosaic of Montreal. The pair have relocated permanently to Outremont, and Payare is contracted to conduct the OSM for at least another three seasons.

After two years leading Montreal’s premiere Symphony, Payare feels as though he’s found a home at Maison Symphonique.

“Everybody here has a very high ethic,” Payare declares. “Everybody cares. It’s just with a lot of joy and a lot of love. Even if it’s amazing, we try to do it a little better.”◼︎

Discover the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal’s 2024-2025 season.

_{Cover photo: Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal}