Excitement is building for Pacific Symphony as the orchestra launches its 2025-26 Classics and Pops seasons.
Longtime Music Director Carl St.Clair is passing the baton to Artistic and Music Director Designate Alexander Shelley, who conducted his first Classics Concert of the season October 16.
Relative newcomer Enrico Lopez-Yañez, the symphony’s Principal Pops Conductor, is preparing to launch his third Pops season November 14. It’s a season filled with a mix of iconic pop hits, cinematic scores, Broadway favorites, vibrant Latin rhythms, and other concerts guaranteed to please audiences. Or, as the Pacific Symphony’s press announcement states, “It’s a series that promises both nostalgic favorites and exhilarating new musical experiences.”
Season highlights include:
- The 2025-26 Pops Opening Night features Dolly Parton’s Threads: My Songs in Symphony (Nov. 14-15), a dazzling multimedia concert featuring hand-picked vocalists, guest musicians, and personal stories shared by Dolly on screen.
- Celebrate the holidays in style at A Rat Pack Christmas with Tony Desare (Dec. 19-20), showcasing the star performer’s charm, piano virtuosity and smooth vocals.
- Fans of the films “A Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Beetlejuice” won’t want to miss Danny Elfman’s Music from The Films of Tim Burton (Feb. 13-14), an eerie and whimsical evening of cinematic scores featuring violinist Sandy Cameron.
- After a sold-out debut with the Symphony in a duo with Cody Fry, singer-songwriter Ben Rector returns with Songs for America (March 13-14), a heartfelt performance inspired by his travels across the country.
- Memorable songs like “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” shine in “My Fair Lady” in Concert (April 24-25), featuring lush orchestration and standout vocalists.
- An Enchanted Evening with The Three Mexican Tenors (May 15–16) features thrilling operatic favorites and passionate Latin love songs in a vibrant, crowd-pleasing celebration of unforgettable melodies.
- Windborne’s Music of Journey (June 5–6) cranks up the symphonic power as Pacific Symphony and a team of great artists reimagine Journey’s greatest hits including “Separate Ways,” “Open Arms,” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a high-energy, arena-rock concert experience.
“We’re thrilled to bring back fan favorites while introducing fresh faces to the Pops Series this year,” added Lopez-Yañez. “Each performance brings something special—creative arrangements and inspired collaborations that breathe new life into familiar favorites.”
Pacific Symphony President and CEO, John Forsyte, added, “As we unveil another exhilarating Pops season, we extend our gratitude to our devoted ticket holders whose energy fuels every performance. Our musicians—renowned for their versatility and artistry—are a true Orange County treasure, and we’re proud to share their talents under Enrico Lopez-Yañez’s dynamic leadership.”
All performances begin at 8 p.m. and take place at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Tickets range from $50 – $182 per concert. Pops subscriptions are available in seven-concert and four-concert “choose-your-own” packages, priced from $159–$1,337. For more information or to purchase tickets, call (714) 755-5799 or visit www.PacificSymphony.org.
Behind the Scenes of the Pops Season with Maestro Enrico Lopez-Yañez
Enrico Lopez-Yañez sat down with the Newport Beach Indy to offer his comments on the new Pops season.
NB Indy: As the Pacific Symphony’s Pops conductor, the concerts you typically program are very different from the symphony’s classical concerts.
Lopez-Yañez: Pops is unique from the classical side of programming. With the classical series you’re programming essentially one genre of music, which is classical music. But different people come to Pops concerts for different reasons. You may be a fan of rock, a fan of Broadway, a fan of symphonic music. We try and encompass all of that in something that thematically has some kind of linear line throughout the season, but then also highlights the different genres that people might be used to and coming specifically to hear.
NB Indy: You’ve been here for a couple of years as the full-time Pops conductor. How does it feel now to be a little more comfortable and know the orchestra better?
Lopez-Yañez: It’s been great. First of all, there is a trust and bond that builds between conductor and orchestra when you have that kind of time. I feel like we have a sort of partnership and have grown a lot in terms of our trust and flexibility on stage and what we can do. After this many years working together, we kind of know we can tackle any challenge that may be thrown at us, which happens quite frequently, and hopefully the audience doesn’t realize that it happened, but we get through. And unlike the classical concerts, we only have one rehearsal to get all of that to come together and work, and it was rehearsed two hours before the show. The musicians are, of course, prepared and always play at the highest level.
NB Indy: The audience also knows you better, your personality. They’ve come to know you as Enrico, the Pops conductor.
Lopez-Yañez: Hopefully they’ve come to realize that there’s an element of, hopefully, a little unhinged unexpectedness in the shows I like to put on, which is on purpose and intentional. This is an entertainment industry. If you came to the Star Wars show, you maybe weren’t expecting the conductor to whip out a lightsaber and start doing all these crazy things on stage, or for the disco show having an on-stage dance competition. Things like that that help us stand out from the other orchestras and other shows that exist out in the market. I want it to feel interactive, and feel like this is a place to just have a good time. This is all about entertaining people and reaching everyone in the community through the great music that they either grew up with or love nowadays.
NB Indy: Let’s talk about the Pops season. You start off in November with the music of Dolly Parton. She seems to be more popular than ever.
Lopez-Yañez: I don’t know how she does it. She’s everywhere all the time, seemingly. So this is a show that I had the fortune of premiering with her in Nashville last year. It’s a show that is completely a tribute to her music, and she is very much behind the project and the selection of the singers, the music and really the story and narrative that happens throughout the concert too. She appears on screen throughout the show and tells amazing, charming and funny stories about the concept of different songs and the inspiration behind them. It’s really an insight into her mind as much as it is an exploration of her biggest hits. You get all the greatest songs, and a couple of songs that are maybe less known but really significant to her as an artist. So not only do you get to hear her hits, but you also get to hear them in a completely different way, because Dolly herself has never put out a symphonic album. She was very touched and moved by this project. It’s a really cool way to experience her music.
NB Indy: Then you have Rat Pack Christmas,
Lopez-Yañez: Sinatra did Christmas albums, and Dean Martin. So many of the epic songs that we play on the radio and here in our household, year after year, come from that era of music. And Tony Desare, who’s the star of the show, is maybe the best interpreter of that era of music that I know out there doing Symphony shows. He’s performed with every major orchestra around the world. He has an amazing voice and he’s a fantastic pianist and really brings to life the voice and the style of that era in such a unique and great way. Evan Roider is conducting the show, he’s an incredible Broadway conductor and has toured with more than a thousand productions of “Wicked.” We’re excited to have him back to do this holiday show.
NB Indy: I’m looking forward to Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton in February. That sounds fun.
Lopez-Yañez: Danny Elfman has one of the most unique voices in the film industry, I’d say behind maybe only John Williams. He is such a impactful composer, having written everything from films like “Batman” through to big hits like “Nightmare Before Christmas.” His sound from Oingo Boingo and just being that kind of pop rock artist has inspired him to create these worlds of sound that are so unique and so orchestra centric. It’s really a fun way to hear his music. Sarah Hicks is conducting; she is the Pops conductor of the Minnesota orchestra and is frequently at the Hollywood Bowl. She’s very much an expert in film scores.
NB Indy: You are celebrating our country’s 250th anniversary in March with Songs for America featuring Ben Rector.
Lopez-Yañez: We’re so excited about this. Everything on the show is a reimagination of these new songs that he’s actually never recorded and performed. He started writing songs about different cities and states across the country that he had been visiting and been inspired by. And so now he’s getting to reimagine those with orchestra and perform them for the first time, which will be really fun. And of course, he’ll put in some of his big hits as well. And he’s funny, he’s witty and charming, and it’ll be a lot of new music, both for his biggest fans and for people who’ve never heard him before. It’s a surprise for everybody, which is really fun. And we’re one of the first orchestras to do this show.
NB Indy: One of my favorite musicals is “My Fair Lady.” You’re doing that in April but as a semi-staged production.
Lopez-Yañez: “My Fair Lady” doesn’t get more sort of iconic and golden age of Broadway than that. We’re very excited about that, it’ll be a fabulous production with all the greatest hits from that show.
NB Indy: And then you have the Three Mexican Tenors in May, with someone named Jorge Lopez-Yañez—same last name as you.
Lopez-Yañez: This is a show that’s very near and dear to me, because one of the tenors is my dad! He has sung everywhere, from the Metropolitan Opera to opera Australia. For decades, he has been an international tenor singing everything from Rossini to Puccini. For years he has been doing Three Mexican Tenors concerts around the world. Now we’ve created this packaged version of it that really encapsulates a little bit of everything. You get the Three Tenors traditional stuff, from Neapolitan songs, opera and Broadway through to traditional Mexican music. We’re going to be partnering with a live mariachi group as well on this concert. You’ll get some of the biggest hits of popular Mexican music, from Juan Gabriel to Luis Miguel, some of the most iconic Latin pop singers all wrapped up into this one night, which is really fun.
NB Indy: You end the Pops season with Windborne’s Music of Journey. That sounds like a fun way to close the season.
Lopez-Yañez: Journey happens to be one of my favorite bands of that era. They have so many incredible hits including “Don’t Stop Believing.” Windborne is one of the best production companies at bringing to life these classic rock bands with orchestras, they do a great job of incorporating the orchestra into this style of music. And then the casting, of the band and singers who really know how to work with an orchestra. We’ve had some of their other shows, like the music of Queen or Pink Floyd before, so we’re very excited about the Journey concert.
NB Indy: Your Pops season covers a lot of different genres of music.
Lopez-Yañez: The thing that connects all of this is that it’s artists and genres of music that are really enhanced and kind of raised to a different degree by working with an orchestra. There are plenty of genres and music or shows out there that partner with orchestra, but don’t always quite work, or don’t always sound great. We really work very hard here to make sure that we’re highlighting the orchestra, the fact that these kinds of genres or music are enhanced and sort of transformed in a unique way by having the Pacific Symphony connected to them. And I think that’s what the audience is going to see this season.
