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. We stopped going to the symphony as a group years ago, but I still create this pocket guide out of tradition.

Here’s the at-a-glance season guide for the 2024/2025 season still with no comments from me because it’s not worth trying to rate every piece to help my friends pick one concert. If you’re my friend and want recommendations, just call. Besides, you can probably preview nearly all of the pieces nowadays (minus the premieres) by searching on YouTube.

• Official brochure
• Press release
• Subscribe

The position of music director remains vacant for a third full season, and a series of guest conductors will take the podium for this season’s concerts, with the symphony’s Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot wielding the baton for Opening Night as well as three regular season concerts.

¹ Seattle Symphony Co-commission
² 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 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 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, 7C and 7D are the same concerts; the only difference is that 7C is for Thursday nights, while 7D is for Saturday nights.

Notes and changes:

• The Symphony Untuxed series has been revived.
• The Playlist Series has been cancelled. I suspect it was poorly-attended.
• The Seattle Symphony+ online streaming series is no longer being promoted.
• The 7A/7B, 7C/7D, and 7E/7F concert series do not overlap, so you can create your own pseudo-series by taking any two of them, or recreate the 21-concert series by taking all three.
• The 13-concert series is the same as the 7C/7D and 7E/7F series combined, minus the May 1 concert.
• The Family Connections program provides free symphony tickets for up to two children with the purchase of an adult ticket.
• The Seattle Symphony is part of the TeenTix program which offers teenagers (ages 13 through 19) $5 day-of-show tickets for selected concerts. TeenTix members can also buy up to two $10 tickets for Sunday concerts for non-teenage friends and family.
• This year celebrates the 150th birthday of Maurice Ravel with works featured on four regular season concerts.
• Pianist Khatia Buniatishvili joins the Seattle Symphony on Opening Night, perform Gerschwin’s Rhapsody in Blue which turned 100 years old this year. Buniatishvili had been scheduled to be the artist in residence for the abandoned 2020-2021 season.
• Notable other guests include violinist Itzhak Perlman in recital, cellist Yo-Yo Ma performing the Elgar Cello Concerto in a special concert, and regular season concerts with violinists Midori (Brahms Violin Concerto) and Hilary Hahn (Beethoven Violin Concerto).
• The Seattle Symphony is doing a lot of multimedia concerts this year: Movies Fantasia, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 2), Home Alone, Black Panther, La La Land, and Frozen. And space imagery to accompany The Planets.
• A Hallowe’en-themed double-feature of Bride of Frankenstein (with orchestra) and Young Frankenstein (no orchestra).
• Over the years, the format of the Seattle Symphony official brochure has gradually gotten closer and closer to the format of this pocket guide. This makes my job both easier and arguably superfluous.