The 2016/2017 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance

For many years, I’ve 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. For the past several years now, we haven’t ordered any tickets at all because we all have young children, but I still make this guide out of some sense of obligation.

So here’s the at-a-glance season guide for the 2016/2017 season anyway, again with no comments from me because nobody I know is going to use them to decide which tickets to order. Besides, you can probably preview nearly all of the pieces nowadays (minus the premieres) by searching on YouTube.

Here is the official brochure for those who want to read the details, and the press release has links to other pivots:

• Sorted by composer
• Sorted by date
• Sorted by guest artist

Here’s what The Seattle Times thinks of it.

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Insider tip: Click a column header to focus on a specific series. (This feature has been around for several years, actually.)

Legend:

For the weekend of February 17, the concert normally scheduled for Thursday will be held on Friday.

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 the variation. Ticket packages have been combined if they are identical save for the day of the week. For example, 8C and 8D are the same concerts; the only difference is that 8C is for Thursday nights, while 8D is for Saturday nights.

This chart doesn’t include concert series such as the Distinguished Artists series which share no concerts with any of the Masterworks concerts.

Notes and changes:

• The Masterworks series grew from 21 to 22 concerts. The extra concert was added to the 8[CD] series. Extra concerts were also added to 7G and 4A, bringing them to 8G and 5A. The Seattle Pops grew from five to six concerts.
• The 7[AB], 8[CD], and 7[EF] concert series do not overlap, so you can create your own pseudo-series by taking any two of them, or recreate the 22-concert series by taking all three.
• The 13-concert series is the same as the 8[CD] and 7[EF] series combined, minus the January 5 and March 16 concerts.
• The Symphony Kids series no longer exists.

This purports to be the second season of a two-season cycle of Beethoven symphonies and piano concerti. Though when I checked this year’s and last year’s schedules, it looks like they forgot the third and seventh symphonies, and they included the third piano concerto twice and the first and second not at all. Math may not be their strong suit.

There’s also a special Shostakovich Concerto Festival that performs all of Shostakovich’s concertos. I counted. They’re all there.

Hilary Hahn visits Seattle twice this season, once to perform Bruch’s Violin Concerto on the weekend of February 9, and again to perform in recital on October 30 as part of the Distinguished Artists series. A group of us attended one of her recitals a decade ago. She wore a floor-length A-line green dress with sparkly silver shoes. I remember it because we amused ourselves by describing her dress as a Christmas tree, and the shoes were presents that peeked out.