The P-I reports that Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz has announced he'll step down at the end of the 2010-11 season. What is that, 25 years as music director? Like his director-doppelganger Speight Jenkins at Seattle Opera, Schwarz arrived in the mid-'80s and built a good-enough-for-Seattle organization into a nationally noticed one, albeit with more of a brash, East coast management style that's kept the orchestra split into friends-of-Gerry and I-spit-on-your-grave factions. We used to......

If you want to sell out a symphony hall, you have your choice of ninth symphonies. Possibly if you've written eight symphonies, you're well into the swing of things, but for whatever reason, the ninth tends to rule. That said, we see that most of the tickets left for tonight are in the third tier, where the Symphony jacked the prices last season after figuring out that people preferred the sound up there. Lots of......

The Seattle Times tries to put a happy face on the news that the Seattle Symphony is projecting an accumulated $5.5 million deficit by pointing out that ticket sales are up. But the troubling fact remains that over the past three years the deficit has grown from $1 million, to $3.2 million, to $5.5 million. For an annual budget of around $21 million, a deficit of $5.5 million is remarkable. It's true that the......

Seattlest had two very different opera experiences this past weekend, and we wanted to share both with you. (We know Seattlest’s own MVB has already favorably reviewed one of them, but we wanted to add our own two cents.) Here’s the thing about Die Fledermaus (aka “The Bat”). Yes, it’s enjoyably light and funny, but it has moments that fall flat. An operetta (which is the category Die Fledermaus falls into) requires more acting than......

Last Saturday night Seattlest trundled off to McCaw Hall for opening night of Die Fledermaus (running through January 28). We were a little doubtful about just how much fun the operetta (a word that means, "before there were Broadway musical-comedies") would be. General Director Speight Jenkins had cast some giant-voiced Wagnerians in the leads of a lithe, witty farce and it seemed counterintuitive, to be frank with you. With an icing-thin plot involving an extended,......

Late last night Seattlest was mingling with the post-concert crowd in the Founders Room at Benaroya Hall. We'd just had our socks knocked off by an Erwin Schulhoff piece in the Music of Rembrance concert commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day. (Which makes Schulhoff's death one more thing we have against Nazis.) According to our notes, try the cheese plate, skip the house Pinot. We ran into Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz, who'd written a startlingly neo-Romantic......