Oct 8
The Cleveland Orchestra, under the leadership of Franz Welser-Möst since 2002, is one of the most sought-after performing ensembles in the world. Year after year, the ensemble exemplifies extraordinary artistic excellence, creative programming, and community engagement. In recent years, The New York Times has called Cleveland “the best in America” for its virtuosity, elegance of sound, variety of color, and chamber-like musical cohesion.
Founded by Adella Prentiss Hughes, the Orchestra performed its inaugural concert in December 1918. By the middle of the century, decades of growth and sustained support had turned the ensemble into one of the most admired around the world.
The past decade has seen an increasing number of young people attending concerts, bringing fresh attention to The Cleveland Orchestra’s legendary sound and committed programming. More recently, the Orchestra launched several bold digital projects, including the streaming platform Adella.live and its own recording label. Together, they have captured the Orchestra’s unique artistry and the musical achievements of the Welser-Möst and Cleveland Orchestra partnership.
The 2025–26 season marks Franz Welser-Möst’s 24th year as Music Director, a period in which The Cleveland Orchestra has earned unprecedented acclaim around the world, including a series of residencies at the Musikverein in Vienna, the first of its kind by an American orchestra, and a number of celebrated opera presentations.
Since 1918, seven music directors — Nikolai Sokoloff, Artur Rodziński, Erich Leinsdorf, George Szell, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Franz Welser-Möst — have guided and shaped the ensemble’s growth and sound. Through concerts at home and on tour, broadcasts, and a catalog of acclaimed recordings, The Cleveland Orchestra is heard today by a growing group of fans around the world.
Music Director
Franz Welser-Möst has forged one of the most transformative artistic legacies in the history of The Cleveland Orchestra, as its seventh and longest-serving Music Director. Now in his 25th and final season, he has shaped its sound with extraordinary care and imagination, cultivating greater warmth and flexibility, while preserving precision and transparency. Since beginning his tenure in 2002–03, his leadership has characterized a quarter century of artistic excellence, community outreach, and global prominence.
Welser-Möst first appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra as a guest conductor in February 1993 and has returned every season beginning in 1995. By the end of the 2026–27 season, he will have led the Orchestra in more than 1,200 performances in 93 cities spanning 15 US states and 26 countries, including 701 concerts at Severance Music Center. He has appointed 56 of the Orchestra’s 100 current musicians, profoundly shaping its sound for a new generation. Welser-Möst’s tenure ushered in major milestones, from innovative opera stagings to the launch of its streaming platform, Adella.live, and its recording label.
Widely admired for his interpretations of Central European and Russian repertoire, Welser-Möst has also championed living composers, specifically through the Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellowship. His artistic partnerships have resulted in dozens of commissions and co-commissions, and at the close of the 2026–27 season, he will have led The Cleveland Orchestra in 27 world premieres and 21 US premieres.
Welser-Möst has made opera an annual tradition at Severance Music Center, culminating in the creation of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival in 2023. Acclaimed productions of Dvořák’s Rusalka, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute demonstrated his commitment to large-scale storytelling. In May 2027, Welser-Möst leads a fully staged production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, a fitting capstone to his enduring artistic vision and remarkable legacy with The Cleveland Orchestra.
A defining aspect of Welser-Möst’s Cleveland career has been his work with The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. He has consistently advocated for the all-volunteer ensemble as an essential artistic partner in performances ranging from symphonic masterworks to staged opera productions. In 2010, Welser-Möst appointed Lisa Wong to work with the Chorus and, in 2018, he named her Director of Choruses. Together, they have elevated the Chorus with performances at home and on the road.
Beyond Cleveland, Welser-Möst maintains a distinguished international career, marked by a longstanding artistic partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic. He regularly leads the ensemble at the Musikverein and on major international tours, and has already conducted the celebrated annual New Year’s concert three times. In 2024, he was named an Honorary Member of the Vienna Philharmonic, one of its highest honors. He is also celebrated for his interpretations of opera, conducting productions which have been widely acclaimed at the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna State Opera.
composer
Franz Liszt was a man of exceptional energy. He was active throughout his life as pianist, composer, conductor, and teacher, with constant commitments in France, Germany, Italy, and Hungary. He was also a lifelong reviser of his own music. As such, it is not clear to us over a century past his death which piece he was working on at any given moment. Liszt sketched, drafted, completed, revised, and revised again before many of his works were ever published or performed — and even then, they were often subject to further tinkering. His output of original compositions and transcriptions (of his own and others’ works) was so vast, it is likely that his mind, if not his desk, was always a traffic-jam of pieces in various stages of completion.
The symphonic poem Orpheus is exceptional, then, because it enjoyed a relatively simple birth and was never revised. While Liszt was known for his virtuosity on the piano and for the great brilliance of his compositions, this work presents a total contrast in tone and sensibility. In this work is the contemplative Liszt, absorbed not by his lifelong religious devotions, but by the legacy of Greek culture.
In the printed score, this beautiful work is prefaced by a short essay in which Liszt explains how, as conductor of Weimar’s opera house in the 1850s, he was preparing a performance of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. The “sublime simplicity” of Gluck’s music led him to think of Orpheus as a symbol for the essence of art. Calling to mind an Etruscan vase he had seen at the Louvre in Paris, Liszt pictured “the first poet-musician, draped in a star-studded robe, his brow crowned with a mystically royal bandeau, his lips open to utter divine words and music, and his long, slender fingers energetically plucking the strings of his lyre.” Around the figure of Orpheus on the vase lie the wild beasts he has tamed with the beauty of his singing; all nature is subdued by the power of art. The essay insists that the modern world has much to learn from this artistic vision. In his symphonic poem, Liszt made his point by composing music not in an imagined style from ancient Greece, but in a modern, 19th-century orchestral language.
Liszt’s orchestral music has sometimes been dismissed as being derived from Berlioz or ghosted by his disciple Joachim Raff, but in works such as Orpheus, his mastery of orchestration is both personal and obvious; it is a short step from here to the new soundworld of Wagner’s music dramas.
For this work, the two harps play a crucial role in representing Orpheus’s lyre. The opening sections are scored with the character of chamber music, giving expressive solo entries to the woodwinds. Solo violin and cello also contribute, and the mood remains serene and abstracted until a certain quickening of the pace generates a modest climax for the full orchestra. Calm returns, and the final page has a visionary quality with string and wind chords alternating in celestial harmony.
The work was first performed in February 1854 as the overture to a performance of Gluck’s opera. While Orfeo has its own overture, it is, by common consent, a somewhat bland piece that has little in common with the marvelous music of the opera itself. Liszt would have had no hesitation in substituting his own much more appropriate piece; such shifting and substitution was quite normal in the 19th century.
Later that same year, Liszt’s Orpheus was performed in Weimar as a concert work, and in due course it took its place as “No. 4” in the series of 12 published symphonic poems — composed by Liszt throughout the 1850s as part of his enduring legacy after he had given up concertizing as one of the century’s greatest virtuoso pianists.
— Hugh Macdonald
Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.
Composer
Richard Strauss was in his 80s, living in quiet isolation in his villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, close to the Austrian border in the Bavarian Alps. In the early days of the Nazi regime, he had briefly been president of the Reichsmusikkammer, a state music bureau. This was enough to make his position in Germany tenuous at the end of World War II, even though he had consistently tried to distance himself from the world and events around him. He and his wife, Pauline, chose to go into exile in Switzerland, where they lived until 1949, the last year of his life. In that year, his name was cleared by a denazification tribunal, so he was able to spend his 85th birthday and the last few months of life back at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the beautiful surroundings he loved.
He composed very little music in those years of exile. One work was his Oboe Concerto. Another was the Duett-Concertino for clarinet, bassoon, harp, and strings, an unusual work rarely performed today. He also composed some incomplete scenes for a comic opera titled The Donkey’s Shadow. The only other music he wrote in exile is the masterpiece that came to be known as his Four Last Songs, full of nostalgia and that autumnal tone of which Strauss was a master.
The first to be composed was Im Abendrot (At Sunset), based on a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff. This became the last in the set of four, and the one that touches most closely on the theme of death. It was sketched in 1946 but not finished until May 1948. Perhaps Strauss did not expect to compose anything more. But a friend sent him an anthology of Hermann Hesse’s poems, three of which Strauss set in quick succession: Frühling (Spring), Beim Schlafengehen (At Bedtime), and September — the last appropriately finished on September 20, 1948, and essentially the last music he ever wrote. He died a year later without hearing the songs performed.
Throughout these songs, Strauss is completely comfortable in a style he had perfected over many years. The scoring is intricate, full of active filigree in the upper voices, while the bass line moves slowly, underpinning harmonies that can change color with kaleidoscopic swiftness, yet never fail to resolve to cadences that seemed inevitable all along. Divided strings, gorgeous horn writing, and great restraint in the heavy brass, all at a gentle tempo (three of the songs are marked Andante) — these are the traits of a master in his twilight years.
Strauss never indicated the order in which the songs should be sung, apart from placing Im Abend at the end. The standard sequence places Frühling first, a song that invokes spring without a hint of gloom and takes the voice soaring higher than in the other songs, suggesting birdsong (“Vogelsang”) and the miracle (“Wunder”) of the season. There is a rapturous quality in the rich scoring that keeps the winds fully occupied, the strings divided into many parts, and trumpets and trombones silent.
September bids farewell to summer with much regret, expressed in shimmering textures and a wonderful melody that comes to full bloom at the words “Sommer lächelt” (summer smiles). The horn has the unforgettable last word.
Beim Schlafengehen touches on the oblivion of sleep that the soul longs for. Another wonderful melody is offered by a solo violin, to which the singer responds with a magisterial rising phrase while the cellos climb through two octaves. Never has the key of D-flat major been more expressively applied to the sense of peace and repose.
Im Abendrot is darker than the other songs, full of weariness and apprehension. As soon as death is mentioned, we hear the broad, climbing theme from the tone poem Death and Transfiguration, which Strauss had composed 60 years before, capturing hope for a transfigured future. As the music comes to a radiant close, life is not extinguished. High in the woodwinds, two piccolos evoke a pair of larks, and their faint twitterings linger in the air when all else has gone.
Frühling (Spring)Text by Hermann Hesse
In dämmrigen Grüftenträumte ich langvon deinen Bäumen und blauen Lüften,von deinem Duft und Vogelsang.
Nun liegst du erschlossenin Gleiss und Zier,von Licht übergossenwie ein Wunder vor mir.
Du kennst mich wieder,du lockst mich zart,es zittert durch all meine Gliederdeine selige Gegenwart!
In dusky hollowsI have long dreamtof your trees and blue skies,of your fragrance and birdsong.
Now you stand, revealedin glitter and glory,bathed in light,like a miracle before me.
You recognize me,you gently beckon,all my limbs tremblein your blessed presence!
SeptemberText by Hermann Hesse
Der Garten trauert,Kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen.Der Sommer schauertstill seinem Ende entgegen.
Golden tropft Blatt um Blattnieder vom hohen Akazienbaum.Sommer lächelt erstaunt und mattin den sterbenden Gartentraum.
Lange noch bei den Rosenbleibt er stehn, sehnt sich nach Ruh.Langsam tut er diemüdgewordnen Augen zu.
The garden mourns,cool rain sinks into the flowers.The summer shudderssilently, as it comes to an end.
Leaf after golden leaf dropsdown from the tall acacia tree.Summer smiles, astonished and weak,at the dying garden dream.
For a long while, within the rosesit lingers, yearning for rest.Slowly it closesits wearied eyes.
Beim Schlafengehen (At Bedtime)Text by Hermann Hesse
Nun der Tag mich müd gemacht,soll mein sehnliches Verlangenfreundlich die gestirnte Nachtwie ein müdes Kind empfangen.
Hände, lasst von allem Tun,Stirn vergiss du alles Denken,alle meine Sinne nunwollen sich in Schlummer senken.
Und die Seele, unbewacht,will in freien Flügen schweben,um im Zauberkreis der Nachttief und tausendfach zu leben.
Now that the day has made me tired,my ardent desire shallhappily receive the starry night,like a tired child.
Hands, cease all doing,brow, forget all thinking,all my senses nowwant to sink in slumber.
And the soul, unguarded,wants to soar in free flightin the magic realm of night,to live there deeply and a thousand times.
Im Abendrot (At Sunset)Text by Joseph von Eichendorff
Wir sind durch Not und Freudegegangen Hand in Hand;nom Wandern ruhen wirnun überm stillen Land.
Rings sich die Täler neigen,es dunkelt schon die Luft,zwei Lerchen nur noch steigennachträumend in den Duft.
Tritt her und lass sie schwirren,bald ist es Schlafenszeit,dass wir uns nicht verirrenin dieser Einsamkeit.
O weiter, stiller Friede!So tief im Abendrot,wie sind wir wandermüde —ist dies etwa der Tod?
Through sorrow and joywe have walked hand in hand;from our wanderings, let us restwell over the quiet land.
Around us the valleys are waning,the sky is already darkening,only two larks soar upwardsin the air, under the spell of a dream.
Step closer and let them flutter.Soon it is time to sleep;let us not lose our wayin this solitude.
O spacious, silent peace!So deep in evening’s glow,how tired of wandering we are —can this, perhaps, be death?
It is usually said of Johannes Brahms that he delayed composing a symphony until after he was 40 out of respect for Beethoven’s great set of nine — and from a fear of being found wanting in comparison with his mighty predecessor. There is much truth in this. Indeed, Brahms acknowledged it himself.
Brahms’s rapid rise, at age 20, into an elite circle of leading composers was set in motion by Robert Schumann, who declared publicly that Brahms was destined for a great future in the pedigree of German music. In the company of Schumann and his wife, Clara, Brahms had almost exclusively played chamber music — which for them represented Beethoven’s legacy. Meanwhile, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (and its “Ode to Joy”) was being elevated by Liszt, Wagner, and their followers as a pointer to the future of symphonic music.
Brahms always regarded symphonic writing as a tough proposition. Self-critical to the point of destroying an unknown number of works that did not satisfy his exacting standards, we should be thankful that Brahms gave us as many as four symphonies.
Brahms’s long-awaited First Symphony premiered in the city of Karlsruhe in November 1876. The composer was anxious to test it in one of the less prominent German cities before allowing performances in Vienna, Leipzig, or Berlin. Such was its success, however, that performances quickly followed in all major cities, at home and abroad. Once he had given one symphony to the world, the rest followed more rapidly — within nine years. In fact, the success of the First and the choice of a perfect spot for his summer vacation worked miracles and produced the Second Symphony the very next year.
Since 1864, there had been a railroad connection from Vienna to Lake Wörth in the southernmost part of Austria, enticing the capital’s well-to-do to spend their summers there. Brahms liked to compose during his holidays, and in the village of Pörtschach on the lake’s northern shore he found a haven: “It is delightful here,” he wrote, “I will never again spend the summer far from the Prater [Vienna’s main street].” Many a great work was to emerge from those summer retreats amid Alpine lakes and mountains, including the Violin Concerto the following year. (Mahler, who built a villa at Maiernigg just across the lake from Pörtschach, would also find inspiration in those surroundings.)
Upon completing the Second Symphony in the summer of 1877, Brahms had no hesitation in offering it first to a Viennese audience. They heard it on December 30 that year and, like its predecessor, it was soon taken up by the great orchestras of the world. There are dark passages and no lack of tension, but on the whole, this is a sunny work, full of light and vivacity, that leaves listeners in a state of elation.
This impression is most strongly conveyed by the charming third movement, which can make the intricacies and tensions of the first two movements fade into memory, and even compel audiences to overlook the technical skill of the brilliant finale, which sweeps away everything before it. The third movement is a kind of intermezzo, in which a gentle folksy melody is treated as a recurring rondo theme, alternating with two equally charming episodes. The first is a fairylike transformation of the initial theme, sped up; the second is a scherzo-like dance full of cross-accents and chattering exchanges between winds and strings. Brahms’s debt is here more to Mendelssohn and Schumann than to Beethoven.
Is there a darker spirit elsewhere at work? Within a few bars of the opening of the first movement, the trombones are heard lurking in the shadows and, in the development, those hints turn into real threats when the trombones show their teeth in overlapping, grinding entries. As if in remorse, the trombones play a soothing role in the slow movement, where Brahms explores intricate counterpoint, with at least two themes intertwining at any given moment. If the trombones are a sinister force in the first two movements, they step proudly forward in the last movement to close the symphony with the most thrilling D-major triad in all symphonic music.
The cellos similarly have a leading role, with an especially ravishing melody (supported by the violas) as the second subject of the first movement, and an important expressive line in the slow movement. Meanwhile, the first horn takes the spotlight with its superbly shaped solo in the coda of the first movement, which is followed by the first violins indulging their taste for broad melody on their lower strings — as if this is the point towards which the entire edifice of the first movement had been leading.
In Brahms, there are always great moments like this. If we get too excited by one, however, we risk overlooking the next. Eagerness mixed with quiet patience rewards the alert and focused listener.
Golda Schultz's performance is generously sponsored by Astri Seidenfeld.
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