September 08, 2022

Great Expectations of the 2022/2023 Season

Anticipation is high for the upcoming season. The Seattle Symphony’s Vice President of Artistic Planning, Raff Wilson, shares his most significant highlights.

Tan Dun brings his Buddha Passion to the Seattle Symphony and conducts both of the November concerts.

By Leilani Polk

The Seattle Symphony’s 2022/2023 season is brimming with noteworthy names and repertoire favorites. But for Raff Wilson, Vice President of Artistic Planning and the person in charge of putting together the season, there are three programs he anticipates will be especially exciting. Featuring three important composers from three very different eras and backgrounds, these programs all share one thing in common: clear and dazzling artistic vision.

The first, Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion, happens this fall (November 10 & 12, 2022) and is an obvious highlight for its cultural significance, the respected stature of its living composer and its premiere on the Benaroya Hall stage with Tan Dun himself conducting.

Buddha Passion  is the culmination of two years of research, during which Tan Dun visited and documented musical manuscripts from the Mogao Caves, a Silk Road outpost near Dunhuang, China, considered to be one of the world’s great cultural heritage and art sites. The excavated grottoes date back over 1,000 years and contain remarkable displays of Buddhist artwork. From these materials, he conjured the sounds of ancient instruments and chants to illustrate six parables, which unfold as six acts about the Buddha relating to moral lessons of Equality, Karma, Sacrifice, Zen, the Heart Sutra and Heaven-Earth-Mankind. His expansive work was written for orchestra, adult and children’s choruses (the Seattle Symphony will perform the piece with the Seattle Symphony Chorale and Northwest Boychoir), vocal soloists, indigenous singers and traditional Chinese instruments, and even traditional dance.

“It’s a gigantic undertaking,” Wilson says, referring to the many performers involved, as well as the content and unique style. The work is reminiscent of Bach’s Easter Passions, but with Buddhist narratives. Then there is the scope of events the Seattle Symphony is offering in conjunction with Buddha Passion. Those include: The Mogao Caves: An Immersive Experience, a 360-degree virtual journey to the Gobi Desert that vividly showcases the caves, and is presented in partnership with the Dunhuang Foundation. Designed by Greg Downing of Hyperacuity and Eric Hanson of Blueplanet VR, the visually stunning experience will be offered in Benaroya Hall’s Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center (November 3–13, 2022). There will also be a staging of Tan Dun’s participative work, Passacaglia: Secret of Wind and Birds during the Nature Resounds Family Concert (November 3), and two performances of his Ghost Opera for String Quartet and Pipa, its sonicscape incorporating live sounds made by water, stones, paper and metal (November 11, 2022). “We’ve done works by Tan Dun in the past, including his new Trombone Concerto just last season. But this is on a different scale,” says Wilson.

Next, Wilson points to Battleship Potemkin, a unique program that pairs Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film of the same name with a score drawn from works by Dmitri Shostakovich as arranged by conductor Frank Strobel, who leads the Symphony through the presentations (April 20 & 22, 2023).

“This concert brings together two very distinctive Soviet-era artists,” Wilson explains. In the 1920s, silent film director Eisenstein was devising incredible new ways of telling stories in film without sound. His use of editing, montage and special effects was breaking new ground in a still young art form. He remains influential to this day.

The film is based on true events: the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the oppressed and starving sailors of a Russian battleship rebelled against their officers. The film’s massacre sequence, “The Odessa Steps” — where soldiers open fire on the citizens on the steps of Odessa — is one of the most iconic scenes in movie history. Eisenstein’s cinematic techniques increased tension and drama: in the scene, a stroller teeters on the steps for what seems like an eternity before it comes tumbling down, baby and all. From its first screening, Battleship Potemkin was viewed as a very dangerous piece of art. It was censored, and even banned, in many countries for fear of its revolutionary zeal.

Battleship Potemkin has been set to Shostakovich’s music in the past, but April's performance by the Seattle Symphony will feature a new version devised by Strobel, who grew up surrounded by cinema and is a passionate expert on silent films. He created the soundtrack for Battleship Potemkin by taking sections of Shostakovich’s works, most notably his 11th Symphony, and matching it to the imagery. “It’s a very intuitive combination,” Wilson says.

Finally, a program that has been years in the making, postponed from its originally 2020 date due to Covid shutdowns: Leonard Bernstein's Songfest (June 15 & 17), with conductor Marin Alsop at the podium.

Songfest premiered in 1977. “Bernstein was inspired by American poetry to tell the story of America’s artistic past; how American artistry and words expressed the unique spirit of this nation,” Wilson says. It is one of Bernstein’s greatest works, in which he sought to write music to reflect the plurality of American words and art with a new, unfettered freedom.

“Bernstein’s concert works are intriguing, complex and emotionally charged,” Wilson explains. “Songfest is a masterpiece. It’s a very serious work but also full of joy. It has the sound of Bernstein in it; it’s his music, his style and it is a highly unusual format. You very rarely see a concert work for full orchestra with six vocal soloists singing poetry like this. It wears its heart on his sleeve in an irresistible way. Bernstein had a lot to say and he poured that into this music.”