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 either way, you’re going to have to suffer through it. Here’s the at-a-glance season guide for the first season with newly-appointed music director Ludovic Morlot. (Full brochure [pdf].) function filter(c) { var rows = document.getElementById(“schedule”).getElementsByTagName(“TR”); for (var i = 0; i != rows.length; i++) { var row = rows[i]; var className = row.className; if (className != “”) { if (c == ‘all’ || className.indexOf(c) >= 0) { row.style.display = “”; } else { row.style.display = “none”; } } } }

Legend:

For those not familiar with the Seattle Symphony ticket package line-ups: Most of the ticket packages are named Masterworks nX where n is the number is the number of concerts in the package, and the letter indicates which variation. Ticket packages have been combined if they are identical save for the day of the week. For example, 7C and 7D are the same concerts; the only difference is that 7C is for Thursday nights, while 7D is for Saturday nights. The Beyond the Score concerts focus on only one of the pieces. Changes from last season:

• The Masterworks 20 series has been expanded to 21 concerts.
• The Masterworks 10A and 10B series have been dropped.
• The Masterworks 4B series was renamed 4A. (There used to be 4A and 4B, then 4A was dropped last year leaving just 4B. Then I guess they figured having a 4B without a 4A was confusing, so they renamed 4B to 4A.)
• The Thursday Rush Hour series has been dropped.

This chart doesn’t include “one-off” concert series such as the Visiting Orchestras or Distinguished Artists series. A “one-off” series is a concert series which shares no concerts with any other series. (Baroque & Wine and Symphony Specials are grandfathered in; I’ll probably omit them in future years.) 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 my symphony friends. 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.

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. (For example, I know that my friends hate minimalism, so I rated the Adams down even though I myself might enjoy it. They also aren’t big fans of Bruckner.)

• 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.

In many cases, I am not familiar with the piece and am basing my evaluation on what I know about the composer (or am just guessing).