Imagine hearing a voice so remarkable that you remember it 14 years later.

San Diego Symphony Music Director Rafael Payare was the principal horn player for Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra  during a global tour performing Mahler symphonies in 2011. Also on the tour was Swedish mezzo-soprano Anna Larsson, whose voice struck such a chord with Payare that he invited her to sing at three concerts in the newly renovated Jacobs Music Center next weekend.

The highlight of the program will be Mahler’s Second Symphony, “Resurrection.”

“I had no idea Rafael Payare was in that Bolivar orchestra!” Larsson exclaimed. “I knew he came from Venezuela and that he has a great reputation. I’m so glad to know that he was there.”

“I’m thrilled to welcome Anna Larsson for these performances,” Payare said via email. “I have always strongly admired her musicianship and approach to Mahler, especially from the time I was in the Simón Bolivar orchestra.”

While Larsson, 58, frequently performs other composers’ works, including operas, she’s been especially drawn to Mahler since she was a teenager.

“This music is really hard to sing because it has to come from a very pure place,” Larsson said, speaking from her home outside Stockholm. “It’s not like opera, where you use costumes, makeup and acting skills. It’s almost as if you’re naked.

“You have to commit yourself to go into the soul of the music and try to be humble, to just present it so it’s not about me. I like the feeling of being a medium to his music and not being `me, me, me — this is me singing.’”

‘Joyful and enriching’

At Jacobs Music Center, the three “Resurrection” concerts will feature the full orchestra and the 100-singers strong Symphony Festival Chorus. For many attendees, it will be their first time attending a concert in the former Copley Symphony Hall, which has recently emerged from a $125 million-plus redesign.

“ ‘Resurrection’ is a wonderful way to present to the world our new home,” said Payare, whose first San Diego concert as music director in October 2019 featured Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. “His music is close to my heart.”

Singing alongside Larsson will be fast-rising soprano Angela Meade. At New York’s Metropolitan Opera in March 2023, she was a last-minute substitute to sing the title role in Bellini’s opera “Norma.” She gave a headline-making performance.

For this weekend’s concerts, the San Diego Symphony will sound and look different. Payare will place the musicians in what is known as the German setting.

“Normally, you are in the audience and I face the orchestra,” he explained. “To my left is the first violin section and normally the second violin section is next to them. And then the cellos are to my right and the bass section is behind them.

“With the German configuration, the first violin section will be to my left, with the cellos behind them and then the bass section behind the cellos, and the second violin section will be to my right.”

The last time the San Diego Symphony performed “Resurrection” was in 2010. The orchestra was packed close to the edge of the stage to squeeze in the choir on stage behind them.

In addition to the state-of-the-art digital sound and lighting technology in Jacobs Music Center, there’s now ample room for a large choir. Singers will perform from the hall’s permanent new elevated choral terrace at the rear of the stage, behind and above the orchestra.

The vocalists who will sing “Resurrection” here next weekend underwent rigorous auditions to become one of the 100 or so members of the Festival Chorus. It will be almost evenly divided among soprano, alto, tenor and bass voices.

Acclaimed choral conductor Andrew Megill oversaw the auditions with Payare. Last year, Megill prepared the chorus to sing “Resurrection” with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, which Payare also directs.

“The biggest difficulties of this piece are the extremely wide dynamic and expressive demands, and the powerful and virtuosic singing which is required,” Megill said via email. “Working with Rafael in Montreal was a joyful and enriching experience. I’m thrilled to get to explore the piece again with him in San Diego.”

Fit for Mahler

Larsson started learning music in Swedish schools, where the subject is taught to students from the age of 10. She later began lessons with a voice teacher, who saw her potential as an opera singer. Larsson studied at Sweden’s Operastudio-67 for three years before entering the Royal Opera College in Stockholm.

She was 17 when she first heard Mahler. Her teacher encouraged Larsson to attend a concert featuring his compositions.

“I just loved it,” the mezzo-soprano said. “It stuck in my head and I knew I wanted to sing this music. I could feel it so close to me.

“I started opera school, but I still wanted to do a lot of concerts as well. After opera school, I was in a couple of competitions when somebody told me they felt my voice fit for Mahler.”

In 1997, Larsson made her international debut in Mahler’s “Resurrection” with the late Italian conductor Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Since then, she has inhabited a wide variety of opera roles and sung alongside such prestigious conductors as Zubin Mehta, Sir Simon Rattle and Gustavo Dudamel. Dudamel led the international Mahler tour she and Payare were a part of more than a decade ago.

In addition to touring the world, Larsson — with her husband tenor and artist manager Göran Eliasson — runs the Vattnäs Concert Barn in the Swedish village where she was born. A chamber music festival takes place there each year and every other year, an opera.

“We have very much fun with this,” she said. “Both of us teach, so we have a lot of young singers we work with. This way, they can do concerts with an audience. It’s a very cute place, with 300 seats. It’s our summer home.”

Next weekend’s San Diego Symphony concerts will also feature Austrian composer Thomas Larcher’s “Time,” which was co-commissioned by the San Diego Symphony and premiered in 2022 by Payare.

Because “Resurrection” clocks in at 80 to 90 minutes, it will dominate the performances.

“This is one of the absolute masterpieces,” Payare said. “Not only for orchestra but also using chorus and voices so prominently in the fourth movement.”

Larsson, one of those voices, has visited the small house in the Austrian mountains where Mahler composed “Resurrection.”

“We cannot imagine now how quiet it must have been in the mountains – no airplanes, no cars,” she said. “You hear the birds and nature talking to you. This must have been fantastic. Gustav Mahler wasn’t religious as much as spiritual and very connected to everything around him.

“Mahler was of Jewish background but lived in the Catholic world of Austria. He didn’t want to talk about God, but about nature and how we will all mix together and be one. It’s so vast. It’s like a prayer that we all unite in the end.”

San Diego Symphony: Mahler ‘Resurrection’

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 6

Where: Jacobs Music Center, 750 B St., downtown

Tickets: $39-$120

Phone: (619) 235-0804

Online: sandiegosymphony.org