San Diego United States

Jeremy Pound enjoys the great outdoors as the sun sets to Debussy and Mahler at the southern Californian city's eye-catching new venue

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How best to describe the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park? We’ll begin with those names. The ‘Rady’ – rhymes with ‘lady’ – and ‘Jacobs’ refer to local philanthropists who led the way in enabling construction of the $85m venue to be 99 per cent privately funded. The Park, meanwhile, is on a peninsular that sticks out into San Diego Bay and is dominated by the Shell, an enormous canopy covering a stage from which musicians perform to audiences of 2,000 or more – some sitting around tables, some in more formal rows of seats, some spread out on the artificial lawn itself, all in the glorious open air. As a Brit enjoying the warmth of an April evening, I reflect ruefully on how nice it must be to have the sort of climate that allows this to happen.

Opened in August 2021, the Rady Shell is the new pride and joy of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra.