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 2025/2026 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

After a three-year vacancy, the position of music director has been filled by Xian Zhang, who will lead the orchestra on Opening Night as well as nine subscription concerts. She has been signed to a five-year contract and will continue to serve as the music director of the New Jersey Symphony, where she is contracted through the 2027-2028 season. Those who want a sneak peek can watch her conduct the Seattle Symphony this weekend in a concert featuring Holst’s The Planets. (I enjoyed one of her guest conducting appearances with the Seattle Symphony a few years ago. I have tickets to this weekend’s concert, but one of my children really wanted to go, so I gave her my ticket.)

¹ Seattle Symphony Co-commission

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. The exception is the column I marked **, which is just a grab bag of special concerts.

Notes and changes:

• The Symphony Untuxed series, which had been revived for the 2024/2025 season, has once again been dropped.
• 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 April 16 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.
• Cellist Gabriel Cabezas and composer Steven Mackey are this season’s Artists in Focus.
• Notable other guests include recitals from András Schiff, Lang Lang, Seong-Jin Cho, and Conrad Tao, and regular season concerts with Hélène Grimaud (Gerschwin Piano Concerto in F) and Daniil Trifonov (Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto #2).
• Nicholas McGegan conducts an all-Mendelssohn program, including the incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed with actors.
• 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.