On Thursday night, for the first time since early October, Seattle Symphony Music Director Xian Zhang returned to the Benaroya Hall podium, this time with a program of striking contrasts. The first half ventured into unfamiliar territory with a contemporary work for which she has been a leading advocate, while the second turned to one of the 20th century’s blockbuster symphonies…. continue
Xian Zhang, Seattle Symphony’s new music director, conducts during a Seattle Symphony rehearsal in September. Next up, Zhang will lead the Symphony in “Iris Unveiled” Feb. 12-15. (Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times, 2025)
For my latest story in The Seattle Times, I spoke with Xian Zhang about this week’s program featuring Iris dévoilé by Qigang Chen:
As her first season at the helm of the Seattle Symphony moves into its second half, what Music Director Xian Zhang is hoping to achieve with the orchestra — and with the local audience — is beginning to crystallize….
Romanticism has proved more adaptable than its obituaries suggested. Across the 20th century, composers continued to return to music grounded in subjective expression, even when critical fashion leaned elsewhere….
Saxophonist Timothy McAllister, composer Steven Mackey, and conductor Lawrence Renes take bows; photo: Jon Pendleton
A wonderful new saxophone concerto by Steven Mackey featuring Timothy McAllister and some classic John Adams from Seattle Symphony – my review for Classical Voice North America:
SEATTLE – Rather than propose a grand narrative of American music, the Seattle Symphony’s all-American program on Nov. 20 with guest conductor Lawrence Renes set three sharply contrasting voices side by side: Copland’s atmospheric Quiet City, Steven Mackey’s brand-new saxophone concerto Anemology, and John Adams’ ever-astonishing Harmonielehre — a lineup that underscored how differently American composers have approached the orchestra over the past century…. continue
Gabriella Smith recording “Lost Coast” with cellist Gabriel Cabezas at Greenhouse Studios in Iceland. (Sandro Manzon)
Here’s my Seattle Timesprofile of the remarkable young composer Gabriella Smith. This week’s Seattle Symphony concerts will feature her innovative cello concerto Lost Coast, with Gabriel Cabezas as the soloist:
Her official bio reads like a manifesto: “Gabriella Smith is a composer whose work invites listeners to find joy in climate action.” The 33-year-old has built a creative world around that idea — one where music and environmentalism are inseparable…
The Seattle Symphony turned agile chamber band for its all-Baroque evening under guest conductor Ivars Taurins, joined by resident organist Joseph Adam. With the Seattle Opera season opening across town – the company orchestra comprises Seattle Symphony musicians – the program made a virtue of proportion and dramatic resourcefulness…. continue
Ludovic Morlot conducts the Seattle Symphony, with soloist Demarre McGill
With Seattle Symphony on the cusp of a new chapter – music director designate Xian Zhang takes the reins in September – this season-closing program offered a vivid snapshot of the ensemble’s artistic breadth. …
Tan Dun conducting Seattle Symphony, with harpist Xavier de Maistre; photo (c) James Holt / The Seattle Symphony.
A concert built around the artistry of composer, conductor, and cultural connector Tan Dun offers no shortage of conceptual fascination. This week’s concerts mark his turn to the Seattle Symphony podium after a memorable debut here two and a half years ago, when he led his monumental Buddha Passion.
Raised in a remote village in China’s Hunan province and shaped equally by Western classical forms and ancient Chinese traditions, Tan – who since 1986 has been based in the US – brings a theatrical imagination and a deep sense of ritual to the concert stage. He framed last night’s program with a pair of short but intensely colorful works by two early 20th-century composers he admires, serving as explosive preludes to two large-scale pieces from his own catalog.
A vivid reading of Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance, from his 1915 ballet El amor brujo, crackled with rhythmic energy and flared with instrumental color, setting one element against another as water came into protracted focus in the ensuing Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra, composed by Tan in 1998 and dedicated to Tōru Takemitsu.
Tan draws out music’s ritual origins in intriguing ways. Percussionist Yuri Yamashita not only performed the solo part but dominated much of the piece with an almost shamanistic stage presence – from the way she mindfully released droplets from her fingers to the immersive sound world she conjured using bowls of wood or glass, as well as gongs dipped mesmerically into one of two large water bowls over which she presided.
At some moments she even softly vocalized, as if engaged in a conjuring. Enhancing the theatrical experience were three video screens suspended above the orchestra –- one large at center and two smaller flanking it – which projected close-up footage of the bowls and the rippling water, inviting the audience into the tactile, elemental, organic world of the piece.
The orchestra functioned as a kind of elemental chorus, not so much a counterpart as a kaleidoscopic resonator. Specific voices occasionally emerged from the fabric – most memorably in a luminous duet between Yamashita and principal cellist Efe Baltacıgil, whose tone seemed to bloom out of the water’s surface. A long, improvisatory cadenza captivated with its focus on the physicality of sound.
Still, the Water Concerto’s meditative pacing and episodic structure began to feel diffuse over the span of the piece – though whether this observation reflects a Western bias about form or a real imbalance in proportions is a fair question. In any case, this was a welcome opportunity to hear the work in live performance.
After intermission came a brisk, glittering account of Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), a four-minute burst of orchestral color dating from a little before the young Russian’s leap to international fame with The Firebird.
To this taste, the highlight of the program was Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women – a 13-part multimedia concerto that unfolded with greater emotional clarity and formal cohesion than the Water Concerto. Nu Shu originated as a commission for a harp concerto from the Philadelphia Orchestra but, inspired by Tan’s immersive research into a little-known linguistic and social tradition from his native Hunan Province, grew into a sui generis fusion of concerto, orchestral narrative, and ethnomusicological-sociological documentary.
The “secret songs” in question have to do with the vanishing Nüshu tradition — a secret, invented language once used by women in rural Hunan to communicate among themselves in calligraphy and through chanting and song. Tan painstakingly researched the small community of remaining Nüshu speakers, capturing their voices and stories in multiple videos.
Nu Shu unfolds in 13 short video portraits created by the composer and his team – shown on the three screens above the stage – each anchored in the landscapes of the women’s daily lives and their stories of isolation and solidarity, which are shared from generation to generation.
For Tan, the harp represents “the most feminine of instruments,” writes Esteban Meneses in his excellent program note, and serves as “an intermediary between what the composer imagines as the future – the Western orchestra – and the past, represented by the microfilms.”
Xavier de Maistre was the eloquent soloist, playing a kind of bard who mediates these stories and showing remarkable dynamic and expressive range. Tan likewise assigns a crucial narrative role to the orchestra, which acted as a bridge translating memory into something shared and immediate.
Dalia Stasevska and Augustin Hadelich with Seattle Symphony; (c)Jorge Gustavo Elias
Dalia Stasevska has returned to guest conduct Seattle Symphony this week with a relatively brief but refreshing program. Thursday night’s performance offered plenty of dazzling energy, albeit a curious combination of early Prokofiev sandwiched between two vibrant Latin American works.
Alberto Ginastera’s Malambo from the 1941 ballet Estancia — music that put him on the international map – launched the concert with such kinetic force that it reminded me what a crime it is that his music remains so rarely programmed in the US. (Bravo to the Miró Quartet for recording the entire Ginastera string quartet cycle, forthcoming later this year as part of the ensemble’s 30th-anniversary celebrations.) Stasevska articulated the layered rhythms and boldly strident dissonances of Ginastera’s dance with razor-sharp clarity. Even at just a few minutes in duration, it left the audience breathless.
So did violin soloist Augustin Hadelich — though in a very different way. A Seattle favorite – he gave a deeply memorable account of the Britten Violin Concerto on his last stop with the orchestra two years ago – Hadelich brought his signature artistry Prokofiev’s precocious Violin Concerto No. 1.
From his first phrases, which open the concerto, Hadelich astonished with the sheer beauty of his sound, caressing Prokofiev’s melodic line as if entering into a dream. Phrasing glissandi with effortless sprezzatura, he brought a transportive intensity to his account that was never schmaltzy. Hadelich embraced the concerto’s oneiric, fairy-tale character with personal warmth. Stasevska created a more integrated, immersive orchestral blend by positioning the brass stage right and offered sensitive, fluid support.
Hadelich then delighted with an encore that nodded to the evening’s Latin American framing: his own arrangement of Carlos Gardel’s Por una Cabeza, proving, with wryly elegant melancholy, that it doesn’t always take two to tango.
The concert’s second half was devoted to Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’s La noche de los Mayas, a quasi-symphony fashioned from his score for the now-forgotten 1939 film of the same name, which uses a tragic love story to romanticize pre-Columbian Mayan culture. Stasevska underscored the piece’s rhythmic elan and churning colors, along with its touches of chaos a la Stravinsky Rite.
The musicians seemed to thoroughly enjoy giving their all to the score – whether in the weighty brass chords evoking solemn ancient rituals, the mixed meter and collective revelry of a nighttime fiesta, or a touching Mayan serenade duet for flute and percussion.
The last movement opened up into a tour de force spectacle for a massively expanded percussion section that calls for an orchestra-within-the-orchestra, complete with rattles, güiro, and conch shells. I came way impressed by Stasevska’s versatility—a world away from the Sibelius of her last Seattle appearance, and wholly in the spirit of the evening’s exuberance.
Xian Zhang, Seattle Symphony music director designate, conducts the Symphony in its “Holst: The Planets” program March 27. (James Holt / Seattle Symphony)
I reviewed Xian Zhang’s first concert with Seattle Symphony since being named music director designate :
With just a few gestures, Xian Zhang began conjuring a cosmos.
Returning to Benaroya Hall for her first full program since being named Seattle Symphony’s incoming music director, Zhang drew the nearly sold-out concert hall Thursday night into her orbit with her focused, magnetic conducting.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 