Kazuki Yamada conducts the Seattle Symphony; image (c) Brandon Patoc
Some thoughts on the Seattle Symphony’s recent program with Kazuki Yamada:
The state of the world this November feels especially conducive to mourning. Before presenting one of the best-loved Requiems in the canon, visiting conductor Kazuki Yamada opened his Seattle Symphony program with a much less frequently encountered work of grieving by his great compatriot Tōru Takemitsu. Requiem for string orchestra signaled the young Japanese composer’s international breakthrough after Stravinsky heard it and pronounced the composition a masterpiece. .. continue
Tazewell Thompson’s “Jubilee,” about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, will have its world premiere at Seattle Opera Oct. 12-26. (Jeffrey Henson Scales)
My picks for classical events in Seattle in the fall:
No matter how many other leisure-time options compete for our attention, there really is nothing to replace the connection that happens at a live performance. Fortunately for classical music lovers, local organizations are busting out a new season of enticing variety, from early music innovators to contemporary composers inspired by the findings of science. continue
It’s been a long wait … But Seattle Symphony has finally secured its next music director. Xian Zhangwill begin her five-year tenure at the start of the 2025-26 season, it was announced today. A fantastic choice.
This season, Zhang can be heard in two programs with SSO: Holst’s The Planets (paired with Billy Childs’s saxophone concerto Diaspora, with soloist Steven Banks) on March 27-20, 2025; and a Beethoven-Prokofiev program June 12-15, 2025 (with Hilary Hahn as the soloist in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto).
From the press release:
The Seattle Symphony is pleased to announce Xian Zhang as its next Music Director, beginning a 5-year contract in the 2025/2026 season. Zhang is a long-term collaborator with the Symphony, debuting at Benaroya Hall in 2008. Zhang has a special relationship with Seattle; she supported the Seattle Symphony throughout the height of the pandemic as one of the first conductors to return to the stage with our orchestra. Throughout her career, Zhang has gained international acclaim, most notably in her eight seasons as Music Director of the New Jersey Symphony and in her recent appearances as guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra (with which she won a Grammy in 2023), Los Angeles Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestra, among others. Zhang also holds the positions of Artistic Ambassador of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Conductor Emeritus of Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano.
Her commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in the arts has been a hallmark of her career. She has made a point of raising the profile of music composed by women and people of color while being a trailblazer herself. Zhang is the New Jersey Symphony’s first woman Music Director and the first woman to serve as Music Director of any Italian symphony orchestra. She will now be the first to lead a major West Coast orchestra.
Zhang brings boundless energy to the stage, inspiring a powerful sound and a strong connection with both musicians and audience. Most recently, she conducted the Seattle Symphony in performances of Carl Orff’s Carmina burana and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, filling the house and impressing audiences with inspired pairings of well-known works with cutting-edge contemporary pieces. Zhang performs at Benaroya Hall twice during the 2024/2025 season as Music Director Designate. First, on March 27, 29 and 30, to conduct Holst The Planets: An HD Odyssey, also featuring saxophonist Steven Banks in a new concerto by American composer Billy Childs. Next, she conducts Hilary Hahn Plays Beethoven, on June 12, 14 and 15, featuring Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Prokofiev’s triumphant Fifth Symphony.
“I am overjoyed to be the next Music Director of the Seattle Symphony and continue creating music with this exceptional orchestra,” said Xian Zhang, Seattle Symphony Music Director Designate. “For many years, I have been inspired by the Symphony’s incredible talent and keen desire to bring new music to the stage. Joining the Seattle Symphony now feels like coming home. From my 2008 Benaroya Hall debut to joining the orchestra in 2020 for its careful return to live performances, I have long felt a special bond with these incredible musicians. Visiting Seattle has always been a treat as well, for its beautiful landscapes, and of course, to see the clear devotion audiences have for the local arts community. As Music Director, I look forward to connecting with audiences on a deeper level, experiencing inspiring concerts together and discovering new music at Benaroya Hall, one of my all-time favorite performance halls to conduct in. Thank you to all of the wonderful people I have been able to work with at the Seattle Symphony so far — musicians, board members and administrative staff. I look forward to a wonderful future together.”
“Today we are witnessing history being made with the appointment of Xian Zhang as the Music Director of the Seattle Symphony,” said Seattle Symphony President & CEO Krishna Thiagarajan. “Her passionate musicianship is inspiring, her technique is clear and precise and the resulting performances captivate our audiences in heart and soul. Xian was among the first conductors to return to the stage with our orchestra during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, she has forged strong bonds here in Seattle. In fact, her concerts rank among the highest-attended performances since audiences have returned to Benaroya Hall. As Seattle has grown into an important world city and gateway to the Pacific, Xian’s diverse expertise across Asian, Oceanian, European and American orchestras and music schools — from Beijing to New York, Melbourne to Milan — makes her the perfect choice to lead the orchestra in this new era. I am excited by the possibilities and personally could not be happier to gain such a wonderful colleague for our organization. I want to thank the Seattle Symphony search committee, musicians, staff and audiences, who all played a crucial role in this process, as we welcome Xian and her family to the Pacific Northwest. What seemed like a dream a few months ago has now become a reality. Welcome, Xian Zhang!”
“Xian Zhang’s outstanding performances with the orchestra during this search process easily made her a leading choice for Music Director of our Seattle Symphony,” said Susan Detweiler, MD, Seattle Symphony Music Director Search Committee Chair and Board Member. “Our musicians immediately responded to the depth of Xian’s artistry, producing performances that thrilled both us and the audience, making the Board confident that her extensive experience and deep understanding of classical repertoire will further enhance the Symphony’s artistic development. We eagerly await her return to the Seattle Symphony’s podium in March.”
Ludovic Morlot conducting the Seattle Symphony; photo courtesy of the Seattle Symphony
For their second-to-last program of the season, the Seattle Symphony added John Adams’s early breakthrough Harmonium to its repertory with a breathtaking performance led by Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot. During the 1970s, Adams had been building a reputation as an experimental composer doing his own thing in the Bay Area. He had become an advisor on contemporary music to the San Francisco Symphony’s then-music director Edo de Waart and received a commission to write a big choral-orchestral piece to help the orchestra celebrate its first season in Davies Hall, SFO’s new home across the street from the War Memorial Opera House. The premiere in April 1981 was a sensation that launched Adams on his path toward international stardom.
In his guise as a conductor, Adams has paid multiple visits to Seattle to lead the musicians in various of his own compositions and regards the SSO as “an excellent orchestra.” So it was especially satisfying to finally hear the collective forces of the SSO and its Chorale perform this pivotal work from more than four decades ago for the first time.
As it happened, I’d just come from hearing the original septet version of Adams’s 1978 piece Shaker Loops the week before at the Ojai Music Festival (performed by members of the visiting Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with fresh birdsong obbligato from the trees surrounding the outdoor Libbey Bowl). Adams had adopted the idioms of Minimalism in his distinctive, “impure” way in Shaker Loops and does something similar in Harmonium, but working for the first time with the much larger canvas of symphony orchestra and chorus. It was interesting to notice that some of the DNA of Shaker Loops is still present in varied form in Harmonium. At the same time, aspects of the signature language Adams would go on to develop (mostly orchestral, but in some respects choral as well) also appear in this score — certain timbral gestures from the tuned percussion, a shine that anticipates Grand Pianola Music (1982), or the stirring choral “pillars” found in the operas.
But the very fine performance led by Morlot kept me from falling into the trap of viewing a great artist’s early work merely contextually, as a launching pad toward future greatness. Harmonium proved completely compelling on its own terms, a splendidly structured choral triptych that conveys states of transcendence, serene contemplation, and unbridled joy.
Adams initially considered setting texts from the Wallace Stevens collection called Harmonium and then thought of writing for a wordless chorus, relying on their pure sounds, before he found a basis for what he imagined — “human voices — many of them — riding upon waves of rippling sound in John Donne’s “Negative Love” and two poems by Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “Wild Nights.”
Morlot showed his sensitive understanding of Adams’s dramatic use of sudden harmonic modulations — at this stage in his career, the composer had been likening it to the process of “gating” in electronic music — and shaped the sense of progressive revelation via negation in the opening Donne section with a tenacious clarity.
The Chorale, excellently prepared by Joseph Crnko, encompassed an enormous sonic spectrum, from mystic whispers to ecstatic, Whitmanesque yawping that sent shockwaves crashing through Benaroya Hall. (Fittingly, the concert had begun with Tromba lontana, an “anti-fanfare” from 1986 in which the composer uses a pair of trumpets to sound an elegiac rather than military mood, calling to mind Whitman’s poem “The Mystic Trumpeter.”) Adams’s guiding image of surging waves of sound came to life most thrillingly in the final “section”Wild Nights” movement, a drastically contrasting juxtaposition with Dickinson’s death meditation preceding it.
Seattle Symphony Chorale plus part of the fabulous SSO brass section; photo courtesy of the Seattle Symphony
One of the most unforgettable moments in Harmonium is the seamless transition between the polar Dickinson poems, in which Adams builds up an irresistible, orgiastic flow of momentum. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which occupied the second half of the program, happens to offer a plausible parallel in the musical “tunnel” that interlinks its last two movements.
Curiously, the program on which Harmonium was given its world premiere in San Francisco also involved a Beethoven pairing: in that case, with the Emperor Piano Concerto No. 5 — a work whose aura Adams confronted the next year in his wonderfully over-the-top Grand Pianola Music. On this occasion, Morlot — in his first reunion with the SSO since the sadly under-attended opening night of the season last September — approached the Beethoven with a clear sense of proportions and architecture. And with a bigger, more-rounded sound overall than in his Beethoven interpretations of several years ago, when he was music director.
Morlot held back from imposing an “interesting” perspective on the score, following Beethoven’s command of a single eighth-note rest between the first two statements, for example. He followed all of the repetitions — including, a bit surprisingly, even in the Scherzo. Still, the vision that emerged was more finale-centric, it seemed to me, with the terseness of the opening movement as a mere station on the way forward rather than an existential state. Despite brisk tempi, Morlot shaped the eccentrically long-spun melody of the Andante’s main theme with style and drew a magnificent dark sheen from the strings in particular, with bold strokes in the finale.
If aspects of the Scherzo felt understated, Morlot steered clear of the feeling of anti-climax that deflates so many renditions of the finale. The return of the ominous Scherzo music actually felt surprising, and the insistent paragraphs of C major brought to mind something of the French Revolutionary era music that was a clear inspiration for the young Beethoven.
Gemma New with Seattle Symphony; photo (c) Ben VanHouten
A few weeks ago, Gemma New led the Seattle Symphony in an interestingly unusual program centered around Vaughan Williams’s Antarctic Symphony. The New Zealand-born conductor made an unexpected return visit this past week, when she agreed to take on another guest program in lieu of Elim Chan, who had been originally scheduled to make her debut with the orchestra but canceled owing to a family emergency.
New had just the week before stepped in for Marta Gardolińska at San Francisco Symphony — where, as in Seattle, she took on the program that had been announced, with no changes. That remarkable confirmation of New’s versatility and grace under pressure enhances her already impressive profile.
Thus New opened the first night of Seattle Symphony’s program (17 May) with a contemporary piece she had to learn under extra pressure: Unsuk Chin’s Subito con forza. The piece — so texture- and idea-rich that the term “concert opener” really doesn’t do it justice — was one of the many commissions around the (ill-fated) Beethoven anniversary year in 2020 for compositions reflecting in some way or other on the legacy of Beethoven.
Chin has described Beethoven as “the first consciously modern composer, in the sense that every piece asked for original solutions, even if this meant breaking through existing forms.” She adds: “What particularly appeals to me are the enormous contrasts: from volcanic eruptions to extreme serenity.” Subito con forza — meaning “suddenly, with power,” a phrase in the style of a Beethovenian musical indication such as “Allegro con brio” for the first movement of the Fifth Symphony — abounds in eruptions and contrasts. The opening gesture, for example, alludes to the Coriolan Overture and then explodes into a parallel but unfamiliar universe of chiming percussion and extended technique and quickly gutters into ghostly shiverings on the strings.
Seeming to explore untapped potential or multiple other directions Beethoven might have followed with his raw material, Chin’s approach differs in fascinating ways from Jörg Widmann’s Beethoven homage Con brio. New elicited a sense of the incandescent fire of Chin’s imagination, harnessed through the composer’s formidable orchestral technique.
It made for a wonderful companion piece to the second half of the program, the Symphony No. 1 by Beethoven himself. The audience was treated to an engrossingly fresh account that conjured a sense of the young composer bursting with ideas and the passion to stake his claim. New avoided the temptation to play up Beethoven as an eccentric flouting convention, which made his surprise moves in this work all the more effective, from the harmonic detour of the opening measures and the dam-rupturing energy of the extended coda in the first movement to the teasing, step-by-step presentation of the finale’s main theme.
The conductor’s style of sweeping, balletic gestures signaled the mellifluous, fully layered sound she elicited from the orchestra, with careful attention to dynamics and inner lines, but nothing over-polite or smoothed over. New was particularly sympathetic to the wit and humor of Beethoven’s First and — abetted by the Benaroya Hall acoustic — emphasized a somewhat brighter sonority overall, with Alexander White’s trumpet part always clearly discernible. She aligned the double basses in a curious configuration on stage left, divided into two subsections stretching to the wall. I couldn’t quite notice a difference in the sound, but I assume it supported a particular balance she was looking for. New left a vivid impression of having something to say with this familiar rep, and I’m eager to hear more Beethoven from her.
James Ehnes and Gemma New with Seattle Symphony; photo (c) Ben VanHouten
The program also offered an account of the Samuel Barber Violin Concerto featuring Jame Ehnes, one of the piece’s most eloquent advocates today. Any chance to hear Ehnes is to be cherished, but this performance struck me as particularly special, with the violinist adding a darker perspective to the work than I’ve heard before. The unwavering technique and consistently beautiful phrasing were there, but Ehnes touched on a more tragic than consoling aspect to Barber’s long-limbed lyricism.
Oboist Ben Hausmann — who also deserves kudos for his significant role in the Beethoven symphony — set the tone for the Andante with a solo of heartrending sincerity, while Ehnes countered with a melody of his own that seemed to have been generated in the moment. The Andante also allowed him to display the full richness of his 1715 “Marsick” Stradivari’s lower range. The frenzied virtuosity of the brief, perpetual-motion finale takes a drastically different turn from the preceding movements but felt like a necessary counterpart to so much lyrical effusion. New gave the orchestra a good deal of leeway, which, aside from a few issues of balance, encouraged an especially engaging rapport with the soloist.
Ehnes offered a substantial encore with his account of Eugène Ysaÿe’s single-movement Sonata No. 3 in D minor for solo violin, matching passion with flawless technique for this music clearly close to his heart.
Shiyeon Sung conducts cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the Seattle Symphony; photo (c) Carlin Ma
Thursday evening’s program with Seattle Symphony brought the season’s latest guest conductor, Shiyeon Sung, whose international career took off when she won the Sir Georg Solti International Conductors’ Competition in 2007. Typically introduced as the first female conductor from South Korea to achieve international renown, Sung brought musical intelligence and sensitivity to her collaboration with the players, beginning with an effervescent account of Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon Overture.
Jeff Fair’s evocative “magic horn” call established the wonderland atmosphere of early German Romanticism, and Benjamin Lulich followed suit with his beautifully shaped clarinet solo. A few balance issues with the strings aside, Sung brought out the blend of wonder and zestful joy of Weber’s fine score from his last opera, which was written in English for the London stage and premiered in 1826 (the year of Mendelssohn’s Overture toA Midsummer Night’s Dream).
The evening’s other guest was the intrepid cellist Alisa Weilerstein (who made her belated Seattle Chamber Music Society debut last summer with memorable results). Performing as the soloist in Witold Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto is about much more than a fearless display of virtuosity. Clad in vivid red, Weilerstein inhabited the role of Lutosławski’s determined, feisty, and ultimately transcendent solo protagonist with passion and persuasiveness, underscoring the piece’s riveting theatricality.
Incredibly, this marked the SSO’s first-ever performance of the landmark concerto written by the Polish composer in 1970 for Mstislav Rostropovich. Weilerstein made a powerful case for the work, whose four movements unfold without a pause and call for strenuous, nearly continuous participation from the soloist. It is up to the cellist, for example, to hold our attention in an opening soliloquy lasting several minutes. Lutosławski indicated that this passage should be played “indifferently,” even frivolously, but Weilerstein intensified the suspense, her repeated D’s implying a ticking time bomb that is eventually set off by the brutal interruption of the brass.
At the same time, the cellist tapped into a deeply Romantic reserve of soul-stirring expression for the cantilena’s lyrical refuge. Always, though, Weilerstein projected a bravely independent and defiant persona, whether with insouciant pizzicatos or in her vertiginous flights in the uppermost register. The conductor is at times relegated to overseeing traffic control and cueing the aleatoric orchestral responses. Shiyeon Sung led the orchestra sympathetically, giving ample rein to the soloist. After the orchestra’s monstrous, full-force chord near the end, Weilerstein emerged in the epilogue with renewed energy and insistence, a voice crying out against the collective insanity.
As an encore, Weilerstein turned to her recent preoccupation with Bach’s Cello Suites (cf. her Fragments project), offering a moving interpretation of the Sarabande from Suite No. 4 that was especially notable for its unusual degree of probing fragility.
The program’s second half was devoted to Dvořák — the under-programmed Sixth Symphony of 1880, to be precise. Shiyeon Sung showed herself a wonderful colorist in possession of an admirable technique, eliciting Dvořák’s ingratiating blends of woodwinds with sensitivity and refinement, especially in the Adagio. The elegantly controlled diminuendo she shaped near the end of the first movement illuminated a major turning point in the symphonic journey before the concluding flare-up to full, joyful sonority. Rollicking energy dominated, as it should, in Dvořák’s scherzo, its furiant syncopations defiantly exuberant despite the minor key. Rambling detours make the finale the weakest part of the Sixth and pose a challenge to the conductor, but Sung guided the SSO through its leisurely musings with a sense of purpose.
Kahchun Wong led the Seattle Symphony in Mahler’s Third Symphony. (Photos by Carlin Ma)
My review for Classical Voice of Kahchun Wong’s return engagement with Seattle Symphony to conduct Mahler’s Third:
SEATTLE — In 2016, Kahchun Wong’s final hurdle before taking first prize in the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition was to win the jury over with his interpretation of Mahler’s Third Symphony. The conductor reaffirmed his special connection to the work that helped launch his international career during his return engagement with the Seattle Symphony. In the first of three performances of Mahler’s Third, on April 11, Wong reached and sustained a peak of mutual understanding with the musicians for which our era seems to have lost the vocabulary — words like “sublime” having long since gone out of style.
My latest for Seattle Times:, on Conrad Tao’s upcoming Playlist concert with Seattle Symphony:
For Conrad Tao, playing Mozart is like a homecoming.
“The close relationship I have to Mozart is from childhood,” he said during a recent Zoom interview from his home in New York City. “It’s not only a return. Some of it is just a matter of being honest about where I come from.”
Randall Goosby, Christian Reif and the Seattle Symphony; photo (c)Brandon Patoc
While the search for a permanent music director continues, versatility has been in high demand at Seattle Symphony in recent seasons. Week after week, the musicians have had to adjust to the remarkably varied styles of a revolving door of guest conductors. But the latest visitor to the podium, the German conductor Christian Reif, brought the added challenge of a program calling for drastic shifts in style from one work to the next ….
Natalie Christa Rakes performed the roles of Elaine and the narrator in Steven Mackey’s ‘Memoir.’ (Photos by Carlin Ma)
SEATTLE — “Slipping into sepia” is Steven Mackey’s phrase for a composer’s process of signaling an act of memory. “Ostensibly odd musical grammar in the present tense can be understood as an artifact of the past tense when it accompanies a remembered event, like a film’s sepia hue telling us that the scene is meant to be a recollection,” he writes in his commentary on Mnemosyne’s Pool(2014), a symphonic saga that is paired with his violin concerto Beautiful Passing(2008)on the most recent recording of Mackey’s music….
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 