The pre-renovations hall.

The San Diego Symphony Orchestra has announced its 2024-2025 season to be held at the newly renovated and renamed Jacobs Music Center. The space was formerly known as Copley Symphony Hall. Dean P. Dwyer, President and CEO of the David C. Copley Foundation released the following statement.

“The Board of Directors of the David C. Copley Foundation is grateful that the San Diego Symphony has chosen to recognize the contributions of Helen Copley and the Copley family by calling its venue Copley Symphony Hall for more than 30 years. In recognition of the Symphony’s entering into an exciting new era, with the reopening of its renovated venue that will provide new naming opportunities to other community-minded philanthropists like Helen Copley, we are pleased to gift this naming opportunity back to San Diego Symphony in order to inspire a new generation of philanthropic support,”

The renovations to the hall are extensive and include a custom-designed permanent orchestra enclosure and a tunable acoustic canopy. The stage and aud audience seating have been reconfigured to include a choral terrace behind the orchestra which will also serve as audience seating in select concerts. One of the most important musical elements of the hall, the pipe organ, has also been refurbished.

The season opens on Saturday, September 28, at 6:00 pm. There are 20 Jacobs Masterworks programs scheduled for the 2024-2025 season—the most the symphony has ever offered.

The following weekend will present three performances of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. These performances will mark the debut of The San Diego Symphony Festival Chorus. The chorus was auditioned specifically for these performances of Mahler and represents a significant step forward in the artistic integrity of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra.

I’m not sure when Mahler’s Second was last performed in San Diego but it was certainly more than 15 years ago. Mahler’s Second Symphony is a behemoth. Actually, it's not a behemoth, it is the behemoth. The Book of Job gives us an apt description.

“Look at Behemoth...What strength it has in its loins, what power in the muscles of its belly! Its tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of its thighs are close-knit. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like rods of iron. It ranks first among the works of God.”

Hard on the heels of Mahler are Johannes Brahms and Arnold Schoenberg with concerts on Saturday, October 12, and Sunday, October 13. For Brahms, it is his Violin Concerto and then we get Schoenberg’s version of Pelleas and Melisande. Before you run screaming from the room at the sight of Schoenberg on the program, Pelleas is a tonal piece of music that should be classified as expressionist as opposed to avant-garde.

Those three weekends are a tremendous start to the season. We will be taking a closer look at the entire season as we get closer to the day.