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. In the years that have passed since I started doing this, nearly all of the members of the group have started families, and we tried things like splitting tickets, but even that became difficult to maintain, and last year, we ended up not ordering any tickets at all. (Well, no tickets for adults. We did buy tickets to kids concerts.)

I compiled the at-a-glance season guide for the 2013/2014 season anyway, but I didn’t bother adding my comments since we know we’re not ordering any tickets. Moreover, the Seattle Symphony created online playlists where you can listen to the pieces in the upcoming season, so you can decide for yourself whether you like them or not!

Here is the official brochure for those who want to read the details, and you can see what The Seattle Times thinks of it. To access the playlists, go to www.naxos­music­library.com and log on with userid SymphonySubs with password 20132014. Once you’ve logged in, click Playlists in the navigation bar and choose the concerts you want to hear.

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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 is the number of concerts in the package, and the letter indicates which 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 WolfGang series is available only to members of the WolfGang club. It also includes two concerts not listed above (Opening Night and Sonic Evolution).

This chart doesn’t include “one-off” concert series such as the Mainly Mozart or Distinguished Artists series. A “one-off” series is a concert series which shares no concerts with any other series. This year, the Beyond the Score multimedia concerts fell into that category.

According to the Seattle Times article, the new music director has “always dreamed of spending a whole evening with a composer,” and he went big this year, with three concerts consist of multiple works by a single composer.

Symphony trivia: The audience for the Sunday afternoon concerts (series 7G) leans toward what we in the United States euphemistically call senior citizens. I find it interesting to see what those sweet old ladies get put through every year. For example, this year, they get a performance of Carmina burana, which will probably offend half of the audience and delight the other half.