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......

UNDER DA SEA: If, like Seattlest, you are fascinated with underwater life, tonight's your night to revel in the glories of the deep ocean. Seattle Symphony will be playing as a giant screen shows you images from the BBC series The Blue Planet. 7:30 // Benaroya Hall // $17-75 B.Y.O.B. (BRING YOUR OWN BAG): City Council will be discussing this whole bag tax thing tonight at their meeting, and you should go help them discuss......

G IS FOR GEORGETOWN: There are few parts of Seattle we love more and know less about than gritty and glorious Georgetown. We were smitten from the moment we walked into Jules Maes Saloon three years ago and have never looked back. Adding considerable wonderfulness to the neighborhood is the Georgetown Music Festival—Seattle's most under-appreciated music festival—happening this weekend. If you love local music like we do, you will be spending Friday and Saturday......

At the point that we realized all 24 dancers from the Mark Morris Dance Group were on stage simultaneously, we were struck by two thoughts. First: holy shit 24 dancers on stage at once in a delirious, joyous romp; and second: thank god dance companies can still exist that can put 24 dancers all on stage at once. Morris' company was celebrating the 20th anniversary of his early-career classic L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato......

Once again, SIFF is upon us. Even though there are still three weeks until opening night, with today's press launch, things are gearing up for the 34th Seattle International Film Festival. Running a full 25 days, SIFF will present 191 narrative features, 57 documentary features, and 170 short films from 69 countries, including 43 World Premieres (16 features, 27 shorts), 38 North American Premieres (19 features, 19 shorts) and 19 US Premieres (10 features,......

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......

Joshua Roman, for those of you more concerned with what's going on at Neumo's than what's happening in Benaroya Hall, is the star cellist in Seattle Symphony. He's also 23, has hair like a young Bob Dylan, and seriously kicks ass. This Thursday, he'll be joined at Town Hall by three other instrumentalists of his choosing for what's sure to be the best thing happening in classical music this week, if not the best......

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......

Last year, at 22, cellist Joshua Roman became the youngest principal player in Seattle Symphony history. What did you accomplish when you were 22? Yeah, we thought so. Now 23, Roman makes his Seattle solo debut at Town Hall Friday night [tickets], playing JS Bach's 6th Suite, modern composer Gyorgy Ligeti's solo Sonata, and the "daunting and virtuosic" solo Sonata, Op. 8 by Zoltan Kodaly. Your bio says you've played cello with some rock bands--anyone......

It ain't easy being a mid-sized professional theatre: not that long after Seattle's Empty Space declared empty pockets, the 30-year-old Tacoma Actors Guild has closed down. In January of 2005 TAG faced a coronary-inducing $400,000 debt, and though it had made some progress retiring it, their Board president Jim Handmacher said in the Tacoma News Tribune that key foundations were standoffish: “We were optimistic with (new director Charlotte Tiencken) that TAG would get back......

One of the endlessly amusing things about arts orgs is how desperate they are all for cash -- big or small, there's no amount of money-grubbing that's beyond them. It's normal. You go to a show, pay $$ for a ticket, and then a little while later you get a letter or a phone call "informing" you that, you know, what you paid was "really" half-price and could you stand to kick in a......

Because we don't go out on school nights and we need to plan... SATURDAY: In addition to talks and tours, you and the kids can see live demonstrations of wood carving, drum-making, and weaving at the Opening Day Celebration for In the Spirit of the Ancestors, the Burke Museum's new exhibit of contemporary Northwest Coast Native art. 10:30am-4pm // Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture // All Ages // $8 general; $5 kids 5+;......

Wednesday, January 17 >>> West Side Story at Central Cinema. When we first saw the opening sequence to West Side Story, we were convinced our English teacher was playing some kind of joke. Then the Jets vs. Sharks fight sucked us in, and since then we've known the joke was on us for ever doubting the Greatest Musical Ever Made. 7pm; $10 (plays through the 21st) Thursday, January 18 >>> Carrie Clark & The......

Wednesday, January 3 >>> The Intelligence at Chop Suey. We're still waiting for a new album from these local guys - hopefully one that's more Google-able than their 2005 Icky Baby. This show also includes Partman Parthorse and our personal faves the Pleasureboaters. 8pm; $6. 21+ Thursday, January 4 >>> Kled at the High Dive. Tonight's lineup boasts some of our favorite band names in town, including A Gun that Shoots Knives and We......

What's the kindest thing you can say about the Empty Space Theatre closing its doors after 35 years? It can't be this, in the comments section over on the Stranger's Slog: No more life support for dying theaters. E[mpty] S[pace] should have gone under 10 years ago. Creative destruction is important to arts scenes. Energy that could have gone into pulling together a new theater was dumped into propping up a dying one. That......

Now that there's a chill in the air, Seattlest has taken to closing our windows at night before curling up in a warm bed with some hot cocoa and earplugs. That's right, it's officially the fall tour season, and there's live music galore. Behold! Tuesday 19th >>> The Silverback at Fuel in Pioneer Square. No one's ever heard this band, because this show represents the first time The Silverback will bring their downtempo electronic......

Seattlest serves up musical jambalaya for the masses… Delicious! Monday 27th: >>Listening Party at Easy Street Records! First chance to hear The Flaming Lips’ At War With The Mystics and Built To Spill’s You In Reverse, have some drinks and win some prizes! Drink and appetizer specials on hand of course! And who knows, maybe you'll see a bunny or two... 6-8pm, all ages welcome, 21+ over in the bar >>Metric at The Showbox… Intense,......

All right, so Seattlest hasn’t yet seen Così fan Tutte, which is playing right now at Seattle Opera. In fact, tonight, Friday night and Saturday night are your last chances to see it, with Friday and Saturday being your best bet for seats. Since we haven’t seen it, we can’t review it, but we can tell you a few things. The production updates Mozart’s 18th century opera to the 21st century, which, if you’re a......

A couple weeks ago, we erroneously reported that button-down genius Bob Newhart would share the Benaroya Hall stage with the Seattle Symphony. Though Newhart is indeed an amateur drummer, we regret to inform there’ll be no such onstage mashup. However, it is true that Bob and Bob alone will perform his standup comedy act at Benaroya -- where in 1999 we attended his last Seattle performance -- Friday night at 8 and Saturday afternoon at......

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,......

The Tuba is the red-headed stepchild of the orchestra; always shunted to the back, never in the spotlight. But not anymore! Tonight, the Tuba will finally get its due. The Seattle Symphony is pairing Seattle Symphony Composer in Residence Samuel Jones’s Concerto for Tuba and Orchestra with Tchaikovsky’s much-loved "Pathetique" Symphony (No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74). The world premiere (of Jones's piece) was Thursday but you could go today and still say you’d......

The summer’s dearth of classical music is finally over. In fact, there’s so much happening around town we may have trouble fitting it all in without overwhelming you. Bellevue Opera opens its season this weekend with La Bohème by Puccini. If you’ve never seen an opera before, this would be a good one to start with. First of all, the music is already part of the general consciousness; you’ll recognize a great deal of it......

Well, we’ve done it. Seattlest is finally done with the Ring Cycle. And despite ourselves, we enjoyed it. The last installment of the Ring, Götterdämerung, is a marathon of an opera, partially because most of the story is recapped in the prologue. You can read a synopsis here (or, in twenty words or less: recap, recap, recap, magical potion, plot to steal ring, betrayal, betrayal, betrayal, death, funeral pyre, destruction of ring, new world). Aside......

It’s summer, or at least it is practically everywhere else in the country, and every classical musical group in this town and towns nearby seems to be taking a summer hiatus. Seattlest thinks a lot of people are heading out of town this weekend anyway, so perhaps this break is a good business move for the classical folks. We’d love to be able to tell you about upcoming attractions, but many groups have yet to......

Seattle has many classical music outlets, primary among them Seattle Symphony. Next week (from June 23rd to 26th), the Symphony is bringing Verdi's Requiem to Benaroya. Seattlest could totally geek out about this, but we won't. We do love classical music, though, especially anything Verdi wrote for the voice, and we hope to one day, maybe, sing the soprano solo in his Requiem. Besides, Verdi's Requiem wasn't well-loved by everyone; Wagner, adhering to the old......

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......