This was the Tchaikovsky Spectacular, after all, The Rady Shell's annual end-of-summer tradition and a concert I'd somehow managed to miss every year since the venue opened. I'd heard how great it was, repeatedly told myself this would be the summer I finally went, and on another unusually warm evening during San Diego's seemingly endless 2026 El Niño heatwave, I finally did. It was phenomenal, shockingly so.
I've spent a lot of this summer at The Rady Shell, watching an almost absurdly varied collection of musicians occupy the same stage. Bob Dylan hid beneath a black hood and refused to give the audience the nostalgia it expected. Paul Simon turned an evening of music into an unexpected confrontation with aging and mortality. The Beach Boys made thousands of people feel young, Gipsy Kings made them dance, Mt. Joy reminded me how exciting it is to fall in love with a band you discovered as an adult, and just last weekend Jeff Goldblum somehow transformed the place into a jazz club, comedy room and old-fashioned variety show.
Sunday was different from all of them. The Rady Shell wasn't accommodating a touring artist for the evening; the San Diego Symphony was playing in the waterfront home that was built specifically for it, and hearing the orchestra at full force made the venue feel different too. For all the famous musicians who have passed beneath that giant white canopy this summer, this was a reminder of whose house it really is.
And somewhere in the middle of all that orchestral grandeur, Joyce Yang sat down at a piano and damn near stole the whole thing.
The evening began with Venezuelan conductor Manuel López-Gómez making his San Diego Symphony debut and bringing a little of his homeland with him. Before turning to Tchaikovsky, López-Gómez opened with Pedro Elías Gutiérrez's Alma Llanera, a spirited introduction to a conductor who would become increasingly entertaining to watch as the evening progressed.
Tchaikovsky's Capriccio italien followed, and almost immediately I was reminded of one of the funny things about classical music: people who insist they don't know classical music usually know far more of it than they realize, even if it's from old Looney Tunes cartoons. These melodies have escaped concert halls and seeped into movies, television, cartoons, commercials and the general cultural bloodstream. You can spend your entire life accidentally learning music written by people who died a century before you were born.
Then came Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, another piece whose famous opening is buried somewhere in the collective memory whether you know its name or not. But knowing the melody does absolutely nothing to prepare you for watching someone like Joyce Yang play it from across a concert hall - or, in this case, beneath a giant white shell beside San Diego Bay.
Her hands were astonishing. Not simply fast, although at times her fingers moved so quickly that watching them became almost comical, but precise and purposeful, every movement appearing completely intentional even during passages that looked physically impossible. There was no sense of somebody merely surviving extraordinarily difficult music. Yang seemed to own every inch of it.
What made the performance so riveting, though, wasn't merely the technical achievement. Virtuosity can become strangely boring when its only purpose is to demonstrate virtuosity. Yang played with personality, physicality and enormous charisma, leaning into passages, pulling away from others, attacking the keyboard one moment and drawing something impossibly delicate from it the next.
Her entire body seemed involved in the conversation. She reacted to the orchestra, turned toward López-Gómez, smiled, recoiled, leaned forward and then sent another torrent of notes racing across the piano as if her hands had been waiting impatiently for the rest of us to catch up.
I kept thinking about Lang Lang, whom I saw perform with the San Diego Symphony at The Rady Shell in April 2024. Watching Yang produced that same peculiar sensation of witnessing somebody operate an instrument at such an absurd level that you initially focus on the mechanics - How are her fingers doing that? - before eventually forgetting about the difficulty altogether.
That's when virtuosity becomes art. The impossible stops looking like work and starts looking like personality.
Yang was so good that I hesitate to write what I thought walking out Sunday night because it sounds like the sort of overheated declaration you're supposed to reconsider after sleeping on it. I slept on it.
Her performance may have been my favorite individual live musical performance I've seen this year. That is not a small field.
I've seen extraordinary musicians this year. I've watched legends who have been performing longer than I've been alive and younger artists operating at the height of their powers. I've seen shows that made me dance, shows that frustrated me, shows that made me laugh and a couple that unexpectedly left me thinking about death on the drive home. Yang simply stunned me. I was absolutely shocked by her talent.
Maybe part of the thrill was that I didn't arrive expecting her to. I knew she was accomplished, of course. Yang was only 19 when she won the silver medal at the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, where she was the youngest competitor, and she later graduated from Juilliard and earned a Grammy nomination. She has performed with major orchestras around the world and has been doing this at an elite level for most of her life. Knowing someone's résumé and experiencing what made that résumé possible are very different things.
The audience knew what it had just witnessed too, bringing Yang back to the stage after a roaring ovation. What happened next was quieter than Tchaikovsky's concerto and, in its own way, even more memorable.
Yang explained that her one-year-old son was in attendance that night, "seeing what his mom does for the first time." He had occasionally made his own small contribution to the evening from somewhere back stage, his voice briefly audible during the performance. For her encore, Yang chose Earl Wild's transcription of George Gershwin's "The Man I Love" and devoted it to him.
Suddenly the woman who had just spent the better part of an hour doing things with a piano that seemed to defy the normal limitations of human hands was simply a mother playing a song for her little boy. The scale of the evening collapsed beautifully: thousands of people, a world-class orchestra, one of America's most spectacular concert venues, and at the center of it all, something as ordinary and ancient as a parent wanting her child to understand who she is.
He won't remember it. That's the part that got me.
Someday somebody will have to tell him that when he was one year old, he sat beneath The Rady Shell on a warm August night while thousands of strangers watched his mother bring Tchaikovsky to life. They'll tell him that after everyone stood and applauded her, she returned to the piano and played Gershwin for him.
He may see a photograph. Maybe there will be a recording. He will know it happened because other people remember it for him.
There is something almost unfairly beautiful about that. The person for whom the moment meant the most may be the only person there who won't remember it.
Maybe that's part of what music does for us. It gives shape to time we otherwise can't hold.
After intermission, López-Gómez and the San Diego Symphony returned with Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini, and if Yang had provided the evening's individual revelation, the conductor increasingly became its most entertaining visual spectacle. López-Gómez was tremendous.
A product of Venezuela's famed El Sistema music education program and a protégé of its founder José Antonio Abreu and conductor Gustavo Dudamel, López-Gómez has led orchestras throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Sunday was his San Diego Symphony debut, and there was absolutely nothing tentative about it.
Watching him conduct was almost as entertaining as watching the musicians. At his most animated, López-Gómez moved like a madman. His arms flew. His body lunged and twisted. He crouched toward the orchestra during quieter passages as though physically compressing the sound, then rose and hurled himself into the enormous moments with such force that you half expected momentum to carry him directly into the string section. It was wonderful.
Conducting is one of those professions that becomes more fascinating the longer you watch it. To an untrained observer, a conductor can appear to be a beautifully dressed person engaged in an extremely serious argument with the air. Yet dozens of musicians somehow understand the smallest variations in those movements, and under López-Gómez the San Diego Symphony seemed to breathe with him.
Francesca da Rimini gave them plenty to breathe about. Inspired by the doomed lovers Francesca and Paolo in Dante's Inferno, the piece can move from tenderness to terror with startling speed, and the Symphony attacked its enormous shifts in mood with precision and force.
Strings churned. Brass erupted. Percussion could be felt as much as heard. The orchestra could become enormous and almost violent, then pull itself back until thousands of people sitting outdoors seemed afraid to make a sound.
That dynamic range may have been what impressed me most about the entire night. The Tchaikovsky Spectacular is marketed around the obvious spectacle - the famous composer, the famous concerto, the fireworks - but its best moments weren't necessarily the loudest.
The Symphony could be subtle and demure, almost impossibly restrained, then turn grand and boisterous seconds later. Music that was composed more than a century ago kept changing emotional temperature in real time, and a crowd sitting beside San Diego Bay followed wherever it went.
Eventually, of course, restraint had to leave the building. The 1812 Overture was coming.
You know the 1812 Overture. You may not know that you know it, but you absolutely do.
Its final minutes have become so embedded in popular culture that the music practically functions as shorthand for triumph itself. Bells. Brass. Percussion. Huge melodies stacked upon huge melodies, building toward a conclusion so gloriously bombastic that Tchaikovsky might as well have written "AND NOW BLOW EVERYTHING UP" across the score.
Tchaikovsky reportedly wasn't particularly fond of the piece. With all due respect, Pyotr, the crowd in San Diego disagrees.
Earlier in the evening, we had occasionally heard distant fireworks booming somewhere across downtown. My Chemical Romance was performing simultaneously at Petco Park, and every now and then an explosion from that concert floated over the city and intruded upon our evening of 19th-century Russian romanticism.
It was funny more than distracting. Two enormous concerts were happening within less than a mile of each other on a Sunday night in San Diego, one built around the music of My Chemical Romance and the other around a Russian composer who died in 1893, and apparently both had independently concluded that what their performances really needed was explosives.
Then the 1812 Overture reached its finale. The Rady Shell answered.
Fireworks shot into the night above the venue as the San Diego Symphony barreled toward the finish, great bursts of light exploding over the waterfront while López-Gómez seemed to be conducting not merely the musicians anymore but the entire ridiculous scene.
The orchestra got louder. The sky got brighter. The crowd roared. Petco Park never stood a chance.
It was excessive and slightly absurd and absolutely magnificent, one of those moments when adulthood briefly releases its grip and you find yourself grinning like a kid because people are blowing up the sky while an orchestra plays Tchaikovsky.
Sometimes sophistication is overrated. Sometimes you want subtlety and nuance and a pianist playing Gershwin for her baby. Sometimes you want shit to explode. A great night of music can apparently accommodate all those things.
That contrast is what ultimately made the Tchaikovsky Spectacular so satisfying. The evening didn't require choosing between intellectual appreciation and uncomplicated fun, between extraordinary technique and emotional immediacy, or between quiet beauty and enormous spectacle.
It gave us all of it. And it gave us all of it at The Rady Shell, which has become one of the recurring characters in my summer whether I intended it to or not.
I've written repeatedly about how beautiful this venue is, to the point that I risk sounding like I'm on the payroll. I'm not. The damn place just keeps proving the point.
The Shell is beautiful in the obvious ways. San Diego Bay surrounds it. Boats drift past. Coronado sits across the water. Downtown rises beside you, gradually illuminating as daylight disappears. The giant white canopy itself somehow looks futuristic and organic at the same time.
But after spending so many nights there this season, I've come to appreciate something beyond the scenery. The Rady Shell may be one of the most versatile concert venues I've ever experienced.
Think about what has occupied that stage just this summer. Bob Dylan made it dark, mysterious and almost confrontational. Paul Simon made it intimate enough to carry an 84-year-old man's meditations on faith and mortality. The Beach Boys turned it into a giant California singalong. Gipsy Kings transformed it into a dance party. Mt. Joy stretched psychedelic rock across the waterfront. Jeff Goldblum turned it into a jazz club with jokes. Now the San Diego Symphony had filled it with Tchaikovsky.
Every one of those nights felt completely different, yet none of them felt mismatched with the venue. That's remarkable.
There are famous concert halls whose history is so overwhelming that every performer enters somebody else's story. There are arenas that can accommodate almost anything precisely because they have no personality whatsoever. The Rady Shell somehow sits in between: unmistakably itself while leaving enough room for whatever happens beneath it to define the evening.
Sunday offered an especially satisfying version of that relationship because this is, after all, the San Diego Symphony's home. The Shell opened in 2021 as its permanent outdoor venue, and although I've loved seeing rock, jazz, folk and pop artists there, hearing the Symphony command the place at full force felt like watching an extraordinary house being used for exactly what its architect imagined.
The acoustics helped make the case. Yang's piano could sound intimate and crystalline without being swallowed by the open air, while the full orchestra could erupt moments later without dissolving into noise. You could hear the details and still feel the scale.
And occasionally, because this isn't a sealed concert hall, the outside world wandered into the performance. A distant firework exploded from Petco Park. Boats moved through the darkness. A one-year-old called out while his mother was performing. The city continued doing whatever cities do while Tchaikovsky unfolded beside it. I loved that.
Perfection in live music isn't the absence of interruption. It's when everything, including the imperfections, becomes part of your memory of the night.
We live in an age when almost every piece of music ever recorded is available instantly. I can listen to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 before finishing this sentence. I can watch Joyce Yang perform it on a screen. I can find Lang Lang playing another concerto, compare interpretations, rewind the difficult passages and listen to them until they cease being remarkable.
Technology has made music practically infinite. Our time with it remains stubbornly finite. That's why being there still matters.
A recording can preserve the sound of Joyce Yang playing a piano, but it cannot recreate the strange disbelief of watching her fingers move from a hundred feet away. A video can show López-Gómez conducting, but it cannot reproduce the physical sensation of an orchestra suddenly becoming enormous in front of you. A photograph can capture fireworks over The Rady Shell, but it cannot recreate the collective reaction of thousands of people realizing at the same instant that the sky is about to become part of the concert.
You had to be there. That phrase has become a cliché because sometimes clichés are annoyingly accurate.
There is also something uniquely cruel and beautiful about live music: the better it is, the more you become aware that it is disappearing while you're experiencing it.
Every note Joyce Yang played Sunday existed for an instant and vanished. The fireworks bloomed and disappeared. The final chord of the 1812 Overture hung over the bay and then became silence. The evening I'd waited years to attend was suddenly over.
We spend much of life pretending time works differently than it does. We save things for later. We assume there will be another summer, another concert, another dinner with someone we love, another opportunity to call, another chance to go somewhere we've always meant to visit.
Usually there is. Until eventually there isn't.
Music makes peace with that reality better than most of us do. It doesn't attempt to stop time. It gives time something beautiful to do while it passes.
Maybe that's why Yang's encore affected me so much. Her son won't remember his first time seeing what his mother does, but the moment happened anyway. Its value isn't diminished because he can't keep it.
Neither is ours. We don't need to preserve every perfect night for it to have mattered. We just have to notice it while we're in it.
Sunday was easy to notice. The weather was warm. The bay was beautiful. Manuel López-Gómez conducted with exhilarating abandon. The San Diego Symphony sounded magnificent. Fireworks exploded over our heads. And Joyce Yang reminded me, after all the concerts I've been fortunate enough to see, that another human being can still sit down at an instrument and make me wonder what the hell I am watching. That feeling is precious.
You can become jaded about almost anything if you do it often enough. Concerts become assignments. Famous people become names on schedules. Setlists become data. You learn where the bathrooms are, which entrance moves fastest and how long an encore break is likely to last.
Then somebody walks onto a stage and ruins all that professional detachment. Thank goodness.
I've been wanting to attend the Tchaikovsky Spectacular for years because it has become The Rady Shell's traditional goodbye to summer. I expected the fireworks. I expected the 1812 Overture. I expected a beautiful evening beside the bay and a very good San Diego Symphony.
I didn't expect Joyce Yang to give me what may be my favorite performance of the year. I didn't expect a conductor I'd never seen before to be so much fun to watch. I didn't expect a Gershwin encore dedicated to a one-year-old to stay with me almost as much as fireworks detonating over an orchestra.
And maybe that's why we keep buying tickets. Not because every concert changes your life. Most don't, and they don't need to. We go because every once in a while something happens that couldn't have happened to us sitting at home.
A guitar solo catches you off guard. A lyric you've heard a thousand times suddenly means something different. An 85-year-old musician makes you reconsider getting older. A band you've casually liked becomes a band you absolutely love. A pianist's fingers move so impossibly fast that you start laughing in disbelief.
Or a mother sits at a piano beneath the San Diego sky and plays "The Man I Love" for her little boy. Then, half an hour later, Tchaikovsky blows up the bay. What a ridiculous, beautiful thing it is to be alive.
The fireworks eventually stopped. Smoke drifted into the night. López-Gómez lowered his arms, the musicians stood, the audience applauded and thousands of people began collecting their belongings for the walk back toward downtown and the tradition of passing Joe Dreamz before making your way home.
By Monday morning, The Rady Shell was simply The Rady Shell again. The chairs remained. The bay remained. The skyline remained. The stage waited for whoever would occupy it next. But for a few hours Sunday night, all of those things aligned perfectly.
I finally made it to the Tchaikovsky Spectacular. I won't miss it again.
Originally published on August 31, 2026.