Meet the Musicians: Seth Krimsky

By Leilani Polk
 
Being a classical musician generally requires strict adherence to a notated score. But when he’s cooking, Seattle Symphony Principal Bassoon Seth Krimsky improvises, rarely making the same dish twice — or for that matter, even following a recipe.  

He attributes this to a friend who taught him to cook when he was in his 20s. “I’d go over to his place, and he’d say, ‘Okay, we’re making Ethiopian food today,’ and he’d pull out an Ethiopian cookbook, and we’d just start going.” It’s not too far off from how Krimsky likes to cook today. “I’ll see a recipe and I’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea,’ and then I’ll just kind of wing it. So it’s more like playtime for me than anything else; it’s playing in a sand box, except with food.” 

Krimsky has spent the bulk of his professional career playing with the Seattle Symphony. He earned a spot here in 1986 after a year-and-a-half of playing bassoon with Cape Performing Arts Board Orchestra in Cape Town, South Africa, amid working on his master’s degree in music at University of Southern California. He was appointed Principal in 1990 and has witnessed the Symphony progress over decades. “I’m really happy about being in an orchestra that’s as good as this one is now, because it’s all I ever wanted from the time I got here.”  

He never dreamt of playing bassoon. In fact, he was into electric guitar until his brother suggested he take Beginning Winds when Krimsky was in ninth grade. That and a Mad magazine cartoon with a drawing of a bassoon (and the fact that his school already had one he could play), prompted him to try out the instrument. Ironically, he says, “I had no idea what it was going to sound like.” 

These days, playing electric guitar is one of his biggest hobbies outside of cooking, and he’s working on a few multimedia projects that include experimenting with oil projection lights (or liquid light shows), where layers of colored mineral oil and alcohol are moved under the heat of a lamp and produce changing color patterns that are then projected. 

While none of his music outside of the Symphony is particularly classical in sound, “It’s conceived and structured the way a classical musician would,” he explains. “It’s hard to get away from being so grounded in that structure. You’re thinking on a more granular level and at the same time, you’re thinking of the macrocosm. Even if I’m not attempting to do it that way, it just expresses itself because it’s a part of my vocabulary.”

He’ll give the world premiere of his own original work for bassoon, clarinet, double bass and marimba, Out of the Woodwork, at the next Chamber Series concert on Tuesday, March 18, 2025. It will be performed alongside works by Chick Corea, Mario Herrerías and Wynton Marsalis.