CELEBRATING THE ORCHESTRA’S 120 SEASONS OF MUSICAL LEGACY, 25 YEARS AT BENAROYA HALL
Bringing New Sounds to Seattle: More Than 35 Living Composers in Season Highlights
Contemporary works by Salina Fisher, Nina C. Young, Aaron Jay Kernis, Reena Esmail, Lauri Porra, David Robertson, Steven Mackey, Linda Catlin Smith, Gretchen Yanover, Donghoon Shin, Dorothy Chang, Han Lash, Sarah Gibson, Alexandra Gardner, Angélica Negrón, Fazil Say, Jake Heggie, Jennifer Higdon, Edgar Meyer, Jessie Montgomery, Kevin Puts and more.
February 2 will bring Steven Mackey’s Memoir, scored for string quartet, a pair of percussionists and a narrator. Premiered in May 2022, it’s a theatricalized setting of an unpublished memoir written by Mackey’s late mother (who was also the subject of his violin concerto Beautiful Passing, recently featured on Flotation Device via its premiere recording conducted by David Robertson—if only he would bring that to Seattle!). Mackey is a rock guitarist who got involved in instrumental composition through the influence of the Downtown New York improv scene and the broader international avant-garde—something of an American counterpart to Heiner Goebbels or Steve Martland. His music is often quite engaging in its unexpected juxtapositions of styles, but it can also drift into sentimentality, so I’ll be interested to see where in that spectrum this as-yet unrecorded work falls