The Cleveland Orchestra extends sincere gratitude to our Touring Partner, Jones Day Foundation
Oct 20
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
The German army’s siege of Leningrad began in August 1941. In October, before the worst privations overtook the city, Dmitri Shostakovich and his family, along with other artists and musicians, were evacuated to Kyubyshev, deep in the heart of central Russia, where life was uncomfortable but free from danger. Here, Shostakovich was able to complete his Seventh Symphony (nicknamed “Leningrad”) and witness from afar its worldwide success. It quickly became a symbol of Russia’s heroic defiance at a time when the outcome of the struggle against Nazi Germany was anything but clear.
In summer 1943, Shostakovich spent a few months at a special musicians’ retreat in Ivanovo, near Moscow. These “Houses of Rest and Creativity,” set up by the Soviet government, offered composers a comfortable environment and ample time to work. Here, in the space of little more than two months, he composed his next symphony, the immense Eighth, and had it ready for performance in Moscow by November.
Interpreting Shostakovich’s music is like walking on thin ice, yet critics and admirers, both past and present, have confidently proclaimed various interpretations of the Eighth Symphony. In 1943, the authorities were clear that the symphony was a pessimistic work, full of “unhealthy individualism,” at a time when — after the Battle of Stalingrad — the Germans were in retreat and the prospect of victory was finally at hand. Shostakovich’s symphony was therefore relegated to the list of works “not recommended” for performance — in effect, banned.
For some later critics, free of Soviet ideology, the Eighth is a tragic work, lamenting the millions of lives destroyed by the war. For others, its meaning is hidden beneath a veneer of irony, since Shostakovich’s ambiguous position as a Soviet artist (fettered by the unpredictable responses of his masters) bred in him a highly developed skill at dissimulation: he became good at saying one thing and meaning another, of making declarations in public that he might contradict in private. If that same irony informs his music, how do we know whether his merriment is real or his misery feigned?
The short answer is: we can never know. Shostakovich was a very private, if not inscrutable, individual, leaving us free to adopt almost any view of his work without any certainty. He himself never provided any programmatic description of the Eighth Symphony, nor did he connect it with the traumatic times in which it was composed. We are simply left with a symphony in five movements, which encompasses long, thoughtful passages, explosions of untamed force, meditations on easy-going material, bursts of comic humor, pages of intense musical argument, and much else.
Like Shostakovich’s popular Fifth Symphony, the Eighth has an opening movement that grows gradually from a slow, pithy start to a climax of cataclysmic force. It passes through a section of blatant crudity to a second climax, before returning to the isolated emptiness of the beginning. This huge, 25-minute movement displays Shostakovich in all his various humors — in long wandering solos, frantic bursts of energy, whooping horns, furious percussion, and eerily calm low strings.
The same variety of mood characterizes the following four movements. The second has a certain burlesque flavor and a memorable solo for the piccolo. The third is even more lively, a scherzo in 2/4 time set off by the violas. This movement drips with humor. How could critics have ever thought it was pessimistic? It’s fun to watch, too. When the trombones take on the violas’ figuration, they present a splendid sight with their slides darting back and forth. And the timpani, too, takes a turn, a pair of sticks flying over the three drums.
The fourth movement is intensely serious. Shostakovich builds a passacaglia on a 10-measure theme that gradually disintegrates from a full-orchestra unison until the violins alone remain. This theme is repeated a dozen times with different counterthemes — notably in the horn, then the piccolo, then four fluttering flutes, then the clarinet — and then passes almost imperceptibly into the fifth-movement finale.
The final movement is heralded by the bassoons, going their merry way. The music remains carefree even when the tempo increases. But there is tension in the air, and catastrophe soon strikes with the forceful, climactic music from the first movement. A long solo for the bass clarinet finally restores calm, and the end has a seraphic quality, offering deep repose.
The symphony traces the complete gamut of human feeling, but does it have a precise meaning? Let those of us listening decide for ourselves.
— 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.
Jump to: