New review on Bachtrack:
Talk about keeping the pressure on: Only last month the Seattle Symphony and music director Ludovic Morlot journeyed to Carnegie Hall for an unusually high-stakes concert and attracted a good deal of press coverage — not least because one of the works featured had just won the Pulitzer Prize in music (John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean, a Seattle Symphony commission). Thursday night’s all-French program meanwhile attracted special scrutiny from movers and shakers throughout the American orchestral scene.
This time the ensemble was playing on its home turf at Benaroya Hall, where it welcomed a sizable number of guests in town for the annual conference of the League of American Orchestras. Under the slogan “Critical Questions/Countless Solutions”, some 1,000 participants representing the breadth of America’s orchestral life had flocked to Seattle. Their mission: to brainstorm ways to engage audiences more meaningfully. Ideas ranged from more innovative concert formats and digital initiatives to suggestions for making orchestras “the heartbeats of our cities”, as Morlot put it.
—Thomas May
Filed under: concert programming, review, Seattle Symphony
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 