Every year, I put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. As before, you might find it helpful, you might not, but here it is anyway.

Notes: This chart doesn’t include “one-off” concert series such as the Visiting Orchestras or Distinguished Artists series. Explanations for the partial blocks: The 18A series gets the 11/8 program; 18B gets 11/10. The Musically Speaking concerts typically omit one of the pieces from the evening program, substituting on-stage commentary. The comments column very crudely categorizes the works to assist my less-classically-aware friends. This is, of course, a highly subjective rating system, but I tried to view each piece from the ears of somebody new. Thus, I rated downward pieces that I personally like but which others might not and rated up pieces that I may not find musically satisfying but which nevertheless tend to be crowd-pleasers. These predictions have, of course, proven wrong in the past. For example, this season, my rating of “Okay” for Copland’s Music for the Theatre was too optimistic.

Here’s what the comments mean. Note that they do not indicate whether the piece is significant in a musicological sense; they’re just my guess as to whether my friends are going to like it.

• Awesome: Guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
• Excellent: You will definitely like this piece.
• Good: You will probably like this piece.
• Okay: You may like this piece.
• Nervous: I have a bad feeling about this one.
• Polarizing: Some people will love it; others will hate it.
• Wildcard: I have no idea what will happen.

A question mark means that I am not familiar with the piece and am basing my evaluation on what I know about the composer (or am just guessing).