How This Bay Area Conductor’s Mexican Roots Propelled Him to the Symphony

Twenty-two years ago this month, Donato Cabrera felt like he hit a low point. Instead of conducting orchestras, he was selling CDs at the Metropolitan Opera gift shop in New York City.

He was in his early 30s with a bachelor’s degree and two advanced degrees, each focused on musical performance. Working in a music store was fine when he was a teenager living in Reno. It was not OK when he had expensive rent in Manhattan.

Cabrera, now 54, has served as music and artistic director of the California Symphony since 2013. Previously, he held conducting roles with the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, among many other places. But back in 2002, he wasn’t sure how he was going to exit the gift shop and get back to performing.

One day, a former graduate school classmate was visiting New York and happened to stop by the gift shop. She said she knew of a job that would be perfect for him with Music Academy of the West, a summer festival in Santa Barbara that was hiring an assistant conductor. He applied and landed the job.

While in Santa Barbara, he built a friendship with someone who worked for the San Francisco Opera, which had a job opening for an associate conductor. He landed that role and, in 2005, moved to San Francisco, where he has built an impressive resume. He’s led orchestras for symphonies, operas, ballets and music festivals throughout the United States and Latin America.

In a recent interview, Cabrera talked about his career, how he incorporates his heritage into what has been a traditionally white space and the California Symphony’s 2024–25 season that begins Sept. 21.

Making a living from art, especially in a specialized field like classical music, is challenging and one Cabrera, who was born in Pasadena and was raised in Las Vegas and Reno, didn’t know was a possibility for him.

It was during visits to his paternal grandmother’s house in East L.A. that sparked his love of music. After family meals, she would sit down at her piano and play Mexican waltzes and military marches from memory. She learned to play that music by ear from her father, a musician who traveled all over Mexico performing traditional music.

Cabrera was around 8 years old when, on the drive home from one of those visits, he told his parents he wanted to learn piano. His maternal grandmother bought him one.

“It was really those two folks, both of my grandmothers — one with the musical inspiration, the cultural information that she shared with us — and the other grandmother, through financial assistance, who pushed me forward into this very strange career of being a conductor,” he said.

Cabrera’s story illustrates how culture is transmitted from one generation to the next, but not just by way of exposure or osmosis, as we often think. How many of us have purposely drowned out our parents’ music for more modern, cooler options?

Instead, Cabrera sought to embody music the way his grandmother did. Culture isn’t just meant to be consumed. It should also be internalized.

After finishing high school, he enrolled at the University of Nevada, Reno, with plans to become a high school music director. He thought learning to conduct an orchestra would help him become a better teacher, so he volunteered to lead the university’s student orchestra. The director gave him a chance since it was a small school, but a more prestigious program would have left the task to graduate students.

Cabrera’s professors at UNR pushed him to go to grad school to become a professional conductor. He earned a master’s degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Mentors from that school told him he needed to go to New York City, which led him to the conducting program at the Manhattan School of Music.

“I can’t tell you how thankful I am for these mentors of mine who encouraged me to shoot for the stars when I thought I was happy enough with where I was heading,” he said.

While in grad school, he recalled questioning whether he belonged in the world of classical music, an environment that felt elitist and rooted solely in European traditions. The idea that Latines don’t have a connection to orchestral music is false, Cabrera said. Mexican composers were creating operas in the early 1700s. Most major Latin American cities have a symphony, something Cabrera knows firsthand because he’s conducted in Mexico and Chile.

“What always kept me going was my love and passion for the music,” he said. “It was up to me to get over my preconceptions of my surroundings and my preconceptions of the people around me.”

People might think that the bulk of what a conductor does is stand in front of the orchestra and wave their arms. That’s actually about 1% of the job, Cabrera said. Most of his work involves preparation, organization and planning.

“I’m really engaged in all aspects of what a nonprofit performing arts organization does,” he said. “As a music director, I choose all of the repertoire, all of the soloists. Each season has a narrative. The flow of the music that’s being performed, programmed over the course of many years — that’s on my shoulders.”

The Walnut Creek-based California Symphony will start the season with a program highlighting Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, a masterpiece that was the composer’s final completed symphony. The rest of the season, which includes a total of five concerts and runs through June, will showcase the last works of Johannes Brahms, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Cabrera spearheaded an effort to translate the California Symphony’s website into Spanish, bringing a measurable increase in Latine attendance. The symphony found that Latinos made up about 7% of households that attended performances from 2017 to 2024, almost doubling attendance during the seven years.

His goal, he said, is for anyone who walks into a performance to immediately feel welcome and have more knowledge and understanding of the music when they leave.

“So many people when they go to a concert, they want to hear what they know. They want to sing along to all the songs,” he said. “(Orchestral) music is for everyone, not just for people that grow up with it in their home or people of a certain strata. It’s there for everyone to enjoy.”

This story was reported for K Onda KQED, a monthly newsletter focused on the Bay Area’s Latinx community. Click here to subscribe.