Sequenza21

Miguel Zenón 

Golden City

Alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón’s seventeenth album, Golden City has been well-received, its plaudits including a 2025 Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. The  eleven original compositions are excellent vehicles for soloing.

A standout is “Acts of Exclusion.” After a hocketing opening from the horns – Diego Urcola, Alan Ferber, and Jacob Garchik – and pianist Matt Mitchell, there is a robust essay by the alto saxophonist that combines the quick syncopation of the tune with undulating lines. He trades licks with Mitchell and then cedes the stage to guitarist Miles Okazaki, who returns to the narrower band of the opening, repeating tart, staccato attacks and finally moving up the guitar’s neck with a glissando and the tune in its upper register. Mitchell, bassist Chris Tordini, and drummer Dan Weiss, provide a transition back to the head, with saxophone and winds returning to the hocketing, repeated notes from Mitchell, and Okazaki presenting a fiery recapitulation.

The horn section is showcased on “Wave of Change,” with an extended blues opening that coalesces on the head in octaves, then the rhythm section roaringly arrives. Zenón, an octave higher, joins the rest of the horns. An outro features the saxophonist soloing over Mitchell’s accompaniment. 

“SRO” begins sinuously, with on-the-beat punctuations set against syncopated riffs and Latin-tinged drumming. A quick tempo bass and drums duet introduces a new section on which Zenón paces them note for note and, late in the piece, the rest of the horn section adds mercurial interjections, followed by an ambience that recalls the beginning, but with a fuller presentation. Okazaki gets a brief solo turn to conclude. 

Surrounded by dyadic horns and a stealthy bass line doubled in the piano, “Displacement and Erasure” contains Zenón’s most extended and effusive playing. His use of bends, repeated notes, and angular leaps through modal patterns culminates in a feverish altissimo register climax. Ferber also gets a memorable solo turn that features clarion high notes and breathless long phrases. 

The final track, “Golden,” opens with telegraph signal reiterations from Mitchell and call and response in the horns. The main section has a layered arrangement that Zenón interacts with before trading fours with Urcola and Ferber. Three different ostinatos in horns, piano, and bass conclude the proceedings.

The praise for Zenón is well-earned: Golden City features superlative playing and artful arrangements. It will be tough to top, but I would bet this saxophonist just might. 

-Christian Carey

Seattle Symphony unveiled its 2025–26 season today, the first under incoming Music Director Xian Zhang, who—not coincidentally—is in town this week to conduct The Planets: An HD Odyssey. Having yet to officially assume her new role, her influence over the Symphony’s calendar won’t be fully seen for another year. But she will be on hand for ten mainstage concert series, conducting mostly standard repertory by the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and Rachmaninov (my prediction of more Bruckner at the Symphony may have to wait—the only Bruckner symphony on the agenda is the Fourth, conducted by guest David Danzmayr).

Zhang brings a direct, plainspoken but enthusiastic style to her interactions with audiences and musicians. Her habit of conducting mostly on the beat puts her in the minority of today’s top-flight conductors (a factor that ironically might require some adjustment from the Symphony musicians, accustomed as they’ve been since Thomas Dausgaard’s sudden resignation in January 2022 to a succession of guest conductors that generally follow the current tendency to conduct well ahead of the beat).

The contemporary music offerings, while still lackluster compared to the bountiful Ludovic Morlot/Simon Woods/Elena Dubinets era of the 2010s, at least show signs of positive movement, with the naming of Steven Mackey as one of the season’s two “Artists in Focus”. A guitarist by trade, he’s one of the most interesting composers working in the crossover space shared with musicians like Gabriel Prokofiev and the late Steve Martland. He’ll perform his own RIOT concerto in a season-closing event alongside Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and will also debut a new saxophone concerto written for Timothy McAllister. Also on the docket is the young Seattle transplant Gabriella Smith,  a mentee of John Adams who’ll bring more of a postminimalist sensibility to some slated collaborations with cellist Gabriel Cabezas, the other Artist in Focus.

There’ll also be a newly-commissioned violin and percussion concerto from Christopher Theofanidis, representing the neoclassical lineage of John Harbison and Joan Tower (the latter also reaching the Symphony’s mainstage for the first time ever with a new Suite fashioned from her 1991 Concerto for Orchestra), plus the inevitable portion of grandiloquent mediocrity that’s prevalent in American orchestral programming nowadays. Alas, Northwest audiences will have to look elsewhere to hear music by such late standouts as Kaija Saariaho, George Crumb and Sofia Gubaidulina, or to celebrate the centenaries of Berio, Feldman and Kurtág, the 90th birthdays of Riley and Pärt, or the 80th of Anthony Braxton (arguably the most influential living American composer who’s not a minimalist). Wayne Horvitz, Seattle’s most prominent exploratory musician, is missing on his 70th birthday, as is Bright Sheng, though instead of the latter’s Lacerations or Zodiac Tales we will Zhang conduct Franco-Chinese composer Qigang Chen’s ambitious but saccharine Iris dévoilée for Chinese singers, instruments and orchestra.

The most striking omission, though, is Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot, who after serving as something of a custodial grandparent for the Symphony following Dausgaard’s departure (among other things he’s led the past two season openers), will be taking a breather from Benaroya Hall next season to “leave space for Xian Zhang in the first season of her tenure”, as his manager told me. He’s still slated to conduct in June of this season, and will lead Carmen in May 2026 at Seattle Opera (whose orchestra is drawn largely from the Symphony’s roster). Associate Conductor Sunny Xia is returning next season, though, to help provide some day-to-day operational continuity.

And thus begins the Zhang era. After the tumult of Krishna Thiagarajan‘s just-ended seven-year reign as President and CEO—during which he guided the organization through the COVID pandemic and a period of declining arts support in the Northwest, but also chased away an internationally-recognized Music Director and a Vice President who went on to assume the Artistic Directorships of the London Philharmonic and Concertgebouw orchestras—the arrival of a steady if unglamorous leader who can cultivate the patronage of Seattle’s Asian community (demographically the most reliable supporter of classical music organizations in the US) might be the most propitious way forward for the region’s most prestigious arts institution.

Addendum: Timing the season announcement to coincide with a three-concert series featuring Zhang conducting The Planets (accompanied by projected images of the cited celestial objects, and paired with Billy Childs’ Diaspora concerto for saxophone and orchestra) proved to a spectacular success, with full houses and enthusiastic crowds greeting her arrival. The inter-movement applause heard during Holst’s sprawling masterpiece on Saturday night event evinced the presence of new and less frequent visitors to the Symphony. I spoke to a few audience members who professed genuine curiosity about the new Music Director, and seemed taken by the broad but unexaggerated gestures that emanated from her diminutive frame clad in simple black concert attire. One hopes we will soon see the kind of signature strokes that characterized Morlot’s early years (such as the fondly-remembered [untitled] concerts in Benaroya Hall’s Grand Lobby that featured Symphony musicians in small ensembles performing mostly avant-garde music). But whatever ensues, it seems that Zhang can look forward to a sincere honeymoon period with her new constituents.

It was a valiant effort, and one that might work better in the studio than onstage, but there’s a reason why the coupling of harp and piano, especially with an orchestra behind them, is a rare one: barring extraordinary measures (e.g., amplification, spatial separation or having the instruments play alternately instead of together), the piano will always overpower the harp. This was the unfortunate case in Seattle Symphony’s premiere of Hanoï Songs by Benjamin Attahir, a young composer who’s shown more invention in works like Adh Dhohr (a concerto for the Renaissance-era serpent and orchestra) and Al’ Asr (just given its premiere recording by Quatuor Arod), both of which offer a more subtly-drawn extension of the Dutilleux/Dalbavie strain of post-Messiaen French orchestral writing. His new double concerto—ostensibly a sound portrait of Vietnam that vacillates between antiquity and the colonial war era—does have attractive details, including an array of percussion colors that features nine tuned gongs (four are visible in the photo below). But beyond the balance issues, its essential neoclassicism often slides into Hollywood-esque grandiloquence, a domain where the John Williams of the world will, like the piano in Hanoï Songs, inevitably overshadow the strivers.

Regardless, the Ravel and Fauré offerings in this all-French program (composers and soloists!) sounded wonderful on Saturday night. Particularly enlightening was the juxtaposition of Charles Koechlin’s competent but straightforward orchestration of his teacher Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite with Ravel’s virtuosic deployment of instrumental color in Ma mère l’Oye. His Introduction and Allegro provided an additional vehicle for the Symphony‘s longstanding and much-admired principal harpist Valerie Muzzolini (this time without competition from Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s piano). And it’s been comforting to have Ludovic Morlot back in town leading both these concerts and Seattle Opera‘s Les Troyens following the tumult of early 2025, including Trump 2.0, the sacking of the Symphony’s executive leadership, and the Southern California fires that destroyed thousands of homes, including Morlot’s. Here’s to Western art music as a soothing social unguent.

Attahir’s Adh Dhohr and Al’ Asr were featured in this concert preview from KBCS-FM’s Flotation Device program.