The 2024/2025 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. 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.

Week	Program		21	13	7A 7B	7C 7D	7E 7F		8G	4A	SU
09/19 2024	Boulez: Livre pour cordes (Book for Strings) Ravel: Concerto for the Left Hand Shostakovich: Symphony #8
09/26 2024	Saariaho: Ciel d’hiver (Winter Sky) Ravel: Piano Concerto in G Tchaikovsky: Symphony #4
10/03 2024	Smetana: Overture from The Bartered Bride Brahms: Double Concerto R. Strauss: Suite from Der Rosenkavalier Borodin: Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor
10/17 2024	Mozart: Symphony #40 Haydn: Trumpet Concerto Bent Sørensen: Trumpet Concerto Mozart: Symphony #41 “Jupiter”
11/07 2024	Messiaen: Les offrandes oubliées (Forgotten Offerings) Bartók: Viola Concerto (Zimmerman completion) L. Boulanger; D’un soir triste (Of a Sad Evening) Debussy: La mer
11/14 2024	Britten: Piano Concerto Mahler: Symphony #1
11/21 2024	Takemitsu: Requiem for String Orchestra Fauré: Requiem Elgar: “Enigma” Variations
01/09 2025	Poulenc: Suite from Les biches (The House Party) Poulenc: Organ Concerto Beethoven: Symphony #7
01/23 2025	Wagner: Prelude to Lohengrin Brahms: Violin Concerto Coleridge-Taylor: Ballade Schumann: Symphony #4
01/30 2025	Fauré: Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande Benjamin Attahir: Concerto for Piano & Harp¹ Ravel: Introduction and Allegro Ravel: Mother Goose (complete)
02/06 2025	Jennifer Higdon: blue cathedral Abel Selaocoe: Qhawe (Hero) Abel Selaocoe: Kea Morata (I Love Them So) Abel Selaocoe: Lerato (Love) Giovanni Sollima: Selections from When We Were Trees Tchaikovsky: Symphony #5
03/13 2025	Brian Raphael Nabors: Upon Daybreak¹ Mozart: Piano Concerto #22 Stravinski: Rite of Spring
03/27 2025	Billy Childs: Diaspora  (Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra) Holst: The Planets
04/03 2025	Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto #3 Brahms: Symphony #4
04/10 2025	Bartók: Romanian Folk Dances Raymond Yiu: Violin Concerto¹ Dvořák: Symphony #9 “From the New World”
04/24 2025	Ginastera: Malambo from Estancia Prokofiev: Violin Concerto #1 Revueltas: La noche de los Mayas  (The Night of the Maya)
05/01 2025	Bach: Cantata #51 “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen!” Vivaldi: Gloria Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
05/15 2025	Tan Dun: Sound River² Tan Dun: Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women
06/05	Hadyn: The Creation
06/12 2025	Beethoven: Violin Concerto Prokofiev: Symphony #5
06/19 2025	Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole Schuller: Symphony for Brass & Percussion Ravel: Sites auriculaires Allison Loggins-Hull: Flute Concerto¹ Ravel: Bólero
Week	Program		21	13	7A 7B	7C 7D	7E 7F		8G	4A	SU

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:

21	Masterworks 21-concert series (Choice of Thursdays or Saturdays)
13	Masterworks 13-concert series (Choice of Thursdays or Saturdays)
7A	Masterworks 7-concert series A (Thursdays)
7B	Masterworks 7-concert series B (Saturdays)
7C	Masterworks 7-concert series C (Thursdays)
7D	Masterworks 7-concert series D (Saturdays)
7E	Masterworks 7-concert series E (Thursdays)
7F	Masterworks 7-concert series F (Saturdays)
8G	Masterworks 8-concert series G (Sunday afternoons)
4A	Masterworks 4-concert series A (Friday afternoons)
SU	Symphony Untuxed (Fridays, reduced program)

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.