The San Diego Symphony has pulled out all the stops to kick off its seventh season under president and CEO Martha Gilmer and music director Rafael Payare.

Rather than program a mammoth symphony, it’s shrewdly chosen Maurice Ravel’s phantasmagoric opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (“The Child and the Spells”), which is 100 years old this year. Doing so not only lets the Symphony show its stuff with Ravel’s iridescent score; it opens the door for a vocal and multimedia spectacle led by a bona fide star, mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard, in the lead role of the tantrum-throwing child whose victims teach him a memorable lesson.

Leonard’s engagement is an inspired choice even beyond her celebrated voice and undeniable star power. In 2016, she won a Grammy for this very part, which capitalizes on h

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