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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.
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.
Composer
By the time his 10 years as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory were over, Sergei Prokofiev had established a reputation for being a dangerous modernist as a composer. He was also known as a brash performer on piano, with a taste for violent, percussive sounds. His first two piano concertos, both performed in St. Petersburg, aroused the alarm of critics.
Prokofiev’s encounters with the ballet scores that Igor Stravinsky created for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — The Firebird, Pétrouchka, and The Rite of Spring — brought out even more modernistic tendencies. The ballet he wrote for Diaghilev in 1915, Chout (although it was not performed at the time), and his 1916 opera The Gambler reinforced this energetic, impulsive, and propulsive “bad boy” image.
Taking a summer break in 1916, Prokofiev decided to try writing in a style as different as he could imagine from that of his recent music. He worked with pencil and paper, rather than sitting at his piano as he was accustomed. Utilizing an orchestral ensemble similar in size to Joseph Haydn’s symphonies from more than a century previous, he came up with four short movements. The music’s harmony and rhythm are surprisingly Classical, a certain grace — hitherto missing in his music — predominant.
Prokofiev expected to be derided for “contaminating the pure classical pearls with horrible Prokofievish dissonances,” but also knew that his true admirers would see that the style of the symphony was “precisely Mozartian classicism.”
In the chaotic months after the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Prokofiev managed to put on a concert in what was then called Petrograd (and would soon be renamed Leningrad), in which he appeared as conductor for the first time. The new “Classical” Symphony was a great success. (Though when Prokofiev later conducted his symphony in New York, he was bewildered — as anyone might be — when critics complained that it lacked “grace and melody.”) A month later, Prokofiev traveled east across Russia to Japan and then to the United States, quite unaware that he would not go back to Russia for 18 years.
The instruments in the “Classical” Symphony may be the same as those Haydn used, but Prokofiev writes for them with much more freedom, for example, in his showcasing of the top range of the flute and in the intricate writing for strings.
The first movement is more or less obedient to Classical form, set in a tight sonata form, but musically, the Larghetto second movement reminds us of Borodin’s Nocturne when the violins enter with a soaring melody that Haydn and Mozart could not have dreamed of. On the other hand, the Gavotta third movement is a throwback to the Baroque era, though the gavotte as a dance was already obsolete by the time Haydn started writing symphonies. (Listeners familiar with Prokofiev’s output will recognize that he later reused this short dance movement in Act I of his ballet Romeo and Juliet, when the guests are leaving the Capulet ball.)
The Finale is a virtuoso piece that taxes the most expert orchestras, especially at top speed — the tempo is marked Molto vivace — but it is hard to imagine that its scintillating exchanges between wind and strings could ever be seen as anything other than exhilarating.
Though his “Classical” Symphony was intended as a spoof and commentary, Prokofiev unwittingly unleashed a popular style of modern music that endured for half a century, now referred to as “neoclassicism” and spearheaded by Stravinsky once he had turned his back on the excesses of The Rite of Spring. Not only did Prokofiev inspire others to invoke the discipline and moderation of the Classical style, he drew out of himself a vein of charm and simplicity that leavened many of his youthful, brutalist inclinations. Here, in prototype, he created a new idealism or personal voice, from which he would achieve a perfect balance of old and new in such works as his future ballets Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet.
— 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.
The word “epic” could have been invented to describe the music of Götterdämmerung, the heaven-and-earth-shaking culmination of Wagner’s four-part Ring cycle, complete with vengeance, magic fire, and the redemptive power of love beyond death. Orchestral excerpts from this operatic thrill ride meld with the instantly charming neoclassicism of Prokofiev’s First Symphony and the US premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s Zones of Blue, a clarinet concerto performed by its dedicatee and longtime friend of The Cleveland Orchestra, Jörg Widmann.
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