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 series 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 2017/2018 season anyway, again with no comments from me because nobody I know is going to use them to decide which tickets to order. (Well, sometimes we get a single concert, but it’s not worth trying to rate every piece to pick one concert. If you’re my friend and want recommendations for a single concert in March, just call me.) 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 for the breathless prose.

Here’s what The Seattle Times thinks of it.

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† World Premiere.

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 May 17, the concert normally scheduled for Saturday evening will be held on Sunday afternoon.

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 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 November 30 and June 21 concerts.
• The Symphony Untuxed series was renamed to simply Untuxed.
• The New Year’s Eve concert/party traditionally features Beethoven’s Symphony #9, but this year, they’re trying something different: Tony DeSare performs popular songs from the 20th century, as well as Rhapsody in Blue.
• There are always one-off concerts scattered through the year. Here are some highlights:
  • A two-concert Prokofiev Concerto Festival encompasses the first three piano concertos, both violin concertos, and (just for kicks) the first symphony.
  • A John Williams Conducts Williams concert, wherein the composer-conductor leads the symphony in performances of music from movies he has scored.
  • Don’t worry, Beethoven fans. You’ll still get your Ninth Symphony: It’ll be performed on the last weekend of the year. Not quite New Year’s Eve, but close.