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. At some point, we may start subscribing again, but for now, we pick-and-choose individual concerts.

Here’s the at-a-glance season guide for the 2018/2019 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 21st-century stuff) by searching on YouTube.

• Official brochure
• Press release
• Seattle Times coverage

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¹ World Premiere
² U.S. 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 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 March 7 and April 11 concerts.
• The regularly-scheduled Saturday evening concert for the weekend of 01/17/2019 will be held on Friday at 8pm, and the regularly-scheduled Saturday evening concert for the weekend of 02/28/2019 will be held on Sunday at 2pm. Furthermore, the regularly-scheduled Sunday afternoon concert for the weekend of 03/07/2019 will be held on Friday at 8pm.
• There are always one-off concerts scattered through the year. Here are some highlights:
  • A two-concert Brahms Concerto Festival covers the entire concerto cycle.
  • The Amadeus Live concert screens the Academy Award-winning film with live accompaniment from the symphony.
• The Seattle Symphony has a ticketing program called Family Connections which provides free symphony tickets for up to two children with the purchase of an adult ticket.
• I don’t know when they started doing it, but the Seattle Symphony program now includes estimated running times for each piece. You can see examples in this month’s program.
• This is the final season for Ludovic Morlot, concluding eight years as the symphony’s music director.

Bonus chatter: The estimated running times are a nice touch. I considered with amusement what it would be like if the estimates updated dynamically. “Oh no, he’s taking the repeat in the Bruckner! Recalculating…”