2026 Miami Residency

Miami — Bronfman Plays Beethoven

Adrienne Arsht Center

Fri 8:00 PM

Jan 30

Sat 8:00 PM

Jan 31

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Repertoire & Performing Artists

Mozart

Symphony No. 41

The Cleveland Orchestra

Now firmly in its second century, 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.

Franz Welser-Möst

Music Director

Now in his 24th season, Franz Welser-Möst continues to shape an unmistakable sound culture as Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra. Under his leadership, the Orchestra has earned repeated international acclaim for its musical excellence, reaffirmed its strong commitment to new music, and brought opera back to the stage of Severance Music Center. In recent years, the Orchestra also launched its own streaming platform, Adella.live, and a recording label. Today, it boasts one of the youngest audiences in the United States.

In addition to residencies in the US and Europe, Welser-Möst and the Orchestra perform regularly at the world’s leading international festivals. Welser-Möst will remain Music Director until 2027, making him the longest-serving music director of The Cleveland Orchestra.

Welser-Möst enjoys a particularly close and productive artistic partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic. He regularly conducts the orchestra in subscription concerts at the Vienna Musikverein, at the Salzburg Festival, and on tour in Europe, Japan, China, and the US, and has appeared three times on the podium for their celebrated New Year’s Concert (2011, 2013, and 2023). At the Salzburg Festival, Welser- Möst has set new standards in interpretation as an opera conductor, with a special focus on the operas of Richard Strauss.

Among Welser-Möst’s many honors and awards, he was named an Honorary Member of the Vienna Philharmonic in 2024, one of the orchestra’s highest distinctions.

Yefim Bronfman

piano

Internationally recognized as one of today’s most acclaimed and admired pianists, Yefim Bronfman stands among a handful of artists regularly sought by festivals, orchestras, conductors, and recital series. His commanding technique, power, and exceptional lyrical gifts are consistently acknowledged by the press and audiences alike.

A frequent touring partner with the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors, the 2024–25 season begins with the Pittsburgh and NDR Hamburg symphonies on tour in Europe followed by appearances in China and Japan with the Vienna Philharmonic. With orchestras in the US, he returns to Cleveland, New York, Houston, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Sarasota, and Pittsburgh, and in Europe to Hamburg, Helsinki, Berlin, Lyon, and Vienna. In advance of a spring Carnegie Hall recital, his program can be heard in Austin, St. Louis, Stillwater, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Amsterdam, Rome, Lisbon, Spain, and Washington, DC. Two special projects are scheduled for this season — duos with flutist Emmanuel Pahud in Europe in the fall and trios with Anne-Sophie Mutter and Pablo Ferrández in the US in spring.

Born in Tashkent in the Soviet Union, Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, where he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, head of the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States, he studied at The Juilliard School, Marlboro School of Music, and the Curtis Institute of Music, under Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. A recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, in 2010 he was further honored as the recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane prize in piano performance from Northwestern University and in 2015 with an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music.

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Beethoven

Composer

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was a German composer and pianist whose works revolutionised classical music, bridging the Classical and Romantic eras. His compositions include nine symphonies, numerous concertos, and chamber music that remain cornerstones of Western classical music.

Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”

It is ironic that the last and grandest of Beethoven’s piano concertos has acquired the title “Emperor,” for we can be sure he would not have called it this himself. The nickname is used exclusively in English-speaking countries and we don’t really know when or why it came into use. The irony comes from Beethoven’s fury on hearing that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, betraying the higher ideals of universal brotherhood and liberty that Beethoven so strongly believed in. Emperors, in Beethoven’s experience, were not to be admired. Nevertheless, the title is unarguably appropriate, at least for the grandeur that differentiates this concerto from its siblings.

Beethoven had already composed a piano concerto in E-flat major in his youth, a work that could be classified as his “Concerto No. 0” in a canon of six (or seven if we want to also include the arrangement for solo piano of the Violin Concerto). However, a great gulf of almost 25 years separates that early work from the “Emperor” Concerto, and a three-year gap separates the “Emperor,” composed in 1809, from the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto, both finished in 1806.

The composer never played this last concerto himself in public. By the time of its premiere, his deafness made coordination with the orchestra too difficult. His last public appearance as a pianist was in the solo piano part in the Choral Fantasy in 1808, a work which nevertheless seems to have helped prompt him to embark on this his last concerto.

As in his Choral Fantasy, Beethoven commences the “Emperor” Concerto with a resplendent cadenza displaying scales, arpeggios, trills, octaves, and all the armory of the virtuoso pianist, but no actual musical themes. Beethoven writes an enormously long first movement — by allowing both orchestra and soloist to work their way through a full exposition each, and by allowing his themes (once introduced) to expand freely and his keys to range in all directions.

The first theme is a strong statement, unmistakably positive and muscular, but the second, first heard in the minor in hesitant fragments and then in the major on a pair of horns, seems much emptier. Yet for Beethoven, this kind of theme is not plain. Rather, it was exactly the kind of challenge he needed, for his ingenuity and imagination.

For the slow second movement, the key moves to the remote landscape of B major — a key rarely explored in Beethoven’s era — and the solemn hymnlike tones of the strings’ opening pervade the movement, a high point of serenity. Beethoven makes special capital out of the top octave on the piano, a novelty that could be found on only the latest pianos of his day. Delicate piano arpeggios accompany the winds’ statement of the theme.

The music eventually comes to rest, for with the plain intention of welding his musical thinking into a larger unified sequence, Beethoven repeats the effect so well managed in the Triple Concerto and the Fifth Symphony, with the music running — here, perhaps leaping! — directly into the third movement. In this transition, he goes a step further than those earlier works and actually traces the outline of the coming Rondo theme while the mood of the Adagio is still hanging in the air. The foreshadowing is superbly calculated and effective.

With its high trills and striding left-hand figures, the finale bursts with vigor and energy. There is not much room for harmonic subtlety, least of all in the theme itself, but the vital aim of generating a new source of musical energy is amply achieved. The idea of a piano concerto was thereafter never the same again. The Romantic era had truly arrived, earnest and strong.

— Hugh Macdonald

Mozart

Composer

One of today’s most acclaimed pianists, Yefim Bronfman brings poise and power to Beethoven’s revolutionary “Emperor” Concerto, which Music Director Franz Welser-Möst pairs with Mozart’s formidable “Jupiter” Symphony. Sharing heroic and evocative nicknames, Beethoven’s final piano concerto and Mozart’s final symphony have long represented the epitome of Classical composition. Sometimes composers really do save the best for last!

Visiting Adrienne Arsht Center

Adrienne Arsht Center

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