Eric Kisch wrote:

>Steve Schwartz writes:
>
>>The point is, I suppose, let's see what he does in Cleveland, rather than
>>dismiss him on the basis of what somebody else says.
>
>Late but pertinent, I say "hear hear."

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's music critic, Donald Rosenberg, caught up with
Welser-Most in Zurich.  Here is what he says.  Headline follows:

   Maverick Maestro for Cleveland
   Continental Views on Orchestra's Heir Apparent
   by Donald Rosenberg

   Zurich, Switzerland - Franz Welser-Moest often leaves the door to
   his spartan office at the Zurich Opera House wide open.  Books and
   scores are strewn on the desks and shelves.  A pair of jeans and a
   casual shirt lie on a chair.  From the window, there's a spectacular
   view of the lake and mountains, if the capricious Swiss weather
   permits.

   But something is missing from the office on a drizzly July morning.
   Welser-Moest is nowhere to be found.  He has gone to a distant corner
   of the house to reject a set design for next season's new production
   of Richard Strauss' "Arabella."

   The Zurich Opera's chief conductor is accustomed to running from
   conference to rehearsal to performance at a tempo that would exhaust
   more than a few maestros of his (and lesser) stature.  At 38, the
   lanky Austrian in the rimless glasses, looks more like an eager-beaver
   graduate student than one of the most admired, and controversial,
   conductors of his generation.

   Welser-Moest has energy to spare, which is good:  Since the beginning
   of June, he has led 16 performances of five operas and a concert
   featuring one of his favorite pieces, Franz Schmidt's extravagantly
   post-romantic oratorio, "The Book With Seven Seals."

   Between Zurich performances, he flew to Cleveland June 7 to be
   appointed music director of the Cleveland Orchestra starting with
   the 2002-2003 season.  Considering his nonstop schedule, it may be
   no surprise that Welser-Moest has hardly paused to ponder the
   ramifications of succeeding Christoph von Dohnanyi at Severance Hall.
   Just wait.  Reality is about to take over.

   "I'll be on vacation," says the genial, talkative Welser-Moest hours
   before conducting the second of six performances in eight days.  "I
   had no time to digest any of that.  I am so busy here.  It's a marathon
   for me.  The first week of August, I go to the Dolomites hiking with
   a friend.  That will be the time it will really begin to sink in."

   Reaction to his Cleveland appointment, which will make him the
   orchestra's seventh music director, continues to sink in around the
   world.  In London, where Welser-Moest had a beleaguered six years
   tenure as music director of the London Philharmonic, the news engendered
   astonishment and disbelief from the city's music critics.  Zurich,
   the conductor's paradisiacal musical home since 1995, almost disn't
   raise an eyebrow at the appointment.

   Yet more than a few people in the international music business believe
   Welser-Moest is the right conductor for Cleveland.  Edward Seckerson,
   music critic of the Independent newspaper in London hails the
   appointment as imaginative.

   "At a time when American orchestras apparently want elder European
   statesmen, it's at least encouraging that they're bringing in someone
   young and vital and not a superstar name," he says.  "and someone
   who can do something with the orchestra and develop with that
   orchestra."

   Alexander Pereira, the exuberant director of the Zurich Opera, wasn't
   the least bit surprised when his chief conductor was nabbed by
   Cleveland.  He says Welser-Moest's two decades of experience as a
   symphonic conductor and recent operatic career make him the logical
   choice.

   "It makes no sense to get one of these burned-out 50 year-old conductors
   to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra," sayhs Pereira, who first met
   Welser-Moest in 1978.  "More or less, he is the best Europe has for
   the moment."

   Five years ago, Europe, or London at least, was much more divided
   on Welser-Moest.  He was appointed music director of the London
   Philharmonic in 1990 at 30, a very tender age to assume leadership
   of such a prestigious ensemble.  From the start, he was thrust into
   the city's musical politics, as well as battles with his own managers
   and marketing directors.

   Welser-Moest hoped to devise inventive programs spanning a period
   from the 18th century to last week.  Ochestra officials demanded meat
   and potatoes - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and such - unwittingly or
   not placing him in unfair comparison with esteemed conductors, both
   living and deceased.

   Then a critic dubbed him Franly Worse-than-Most, a moniker that seemed
   vicious at the time, but which the good humored recipient now discusses
   with glee.  "Of all the nicknames for a conductor, I've got the
   nicest," he says.  "My nickname is really cute, when you conside the
   rest.  (Sir Georg) Solti was called Saddam Hussein by the London
   Philharmonic."

   Now Welser-Moest may be having the last laugh.  At an age when most
   conductors are trying to land assistant posts or jobs at universities,
   the Austrian who has hiked the Grand Canyon, run marathons, cooked
   apricot dumplings and driven his wife crazy channel surfing has been
   catapulted to the top of the music world as result of his Cleveland
   appointment.

   Welser-Moest has made a mark as a maverick conductor who commands an
   enormous repertoire ranging from the Austro-German literature with
   which he grew up to music of many cultures and sylistic inclinations.
   He has conducted such daunting pieces as Beethoven's Missa Solemnis,"
   which he first led when he was 20, and Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde."
   His curiosity and interpretive confidence have resulted in well-received
   recordings of mainstream and recent fare by Mozart, Mendelssohn,
   Orff, Mahler, Schumann, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Schmidt, Schreker
   Kanchell, Paert, HK Gruber (a whimsical piece titled "Frankenstein!"
   and others.

   More than three years before he conducts his first notes as boss at
   Severance Hall, no one can tell how the pairing of Welser-Moest and
   Cleveland will play out.  But he is already known to the orchestra's
   audiences from the many concerts he has led since his 1993 debut as
   guest conductor.

   His early Cleveland performances were notable for their authority
   and coherence, as well for as his ability to draw superb playing
   from an ensemble that is legendary for its precision and classical
   discipline.  Then Welser-Moest arrived at Severance Hall last fall
   as a candidate for music director, and his performances largely
   sounded sapped of intensity, polish and daring.  The results were
   perplexing.

   Among those who sensed a change was Welser-Moest.  "The looks from
   the orchestra were different this time," he says, proceeding to pose
   questions the musicians might have mused.  "Is he really the one? Is
   he really the next boss?

   "It's easy to imagine what goes through people's minds when they know
   he may be the next boss.  They act differently I probably did, too.
   I tried to ignore it.  The third week it hit me very hard.  I couldn't
   ignore it anymore.  I can't tell {how it affected me}, but probably,
   yes.  I'm not the right person to say.  I tried to keep my focus."

   Whatever pressure he may have felt last fall, Welser-Moest says
   Cleveland is the toughest American ensemble to win over.  He can
   speak from experience.  He made his U.S.  debut with the St.  Louis
   Symphony in 1989 and since has been a guest of most of the country's
   major orchestras.

   Welser-Moest says he wasn't prepared for the zeal and devotion he
   encountered when he first stood on the Severance Hall podium in
   February, 1993.  "It is the orchestra which is the least laid-back,"
   he says.  "Their work ethic is so high.  Of course, they challenge
   you.  They deliver so much already in the first rehearsal and look
   at you as if to say, 'OK, where do we go from here?' But they're not
   arrogant.  They don't think they're pefect.  They're a proud orchestrta,
   but also a humble orchestra.  They're not snobby.  That's what's so
   beautiful about this orchestra."

   As he talks about the Cleveland Orchestra and other subjects,
   Welser-Moest gives the impression that he takes his art very seriously,
   but himself hardly at all.  He becomes expansive and boyish when he
   mentions the three conductors who have been his greatest influences
   - Wilhelm Furtwaengler, for his sense of architecture and "balance
   between brain and belly." Herbert von Karajan, for his efficiency
   and discipline; and Leonard Bernstein, for the emotional abandon
   Welser-Moest says was part of his own conducting until London stole
   away some of his spirit.

   His eyes almost dance as he pooh-poohs the metronome markings in
   Beethoven symphonies and the authentic-performance movement for its
   lack of "common sense." He sees Bruckner, who was born 10 miles from
   his own birthplace of Linz, Austria, as a composer of "flesh and
   blood," rather than just the church musician many conductors envision.
   Welser-Moest doesn't change a thing in Schumann symphonies, saying
   the orchestration is ahead of its time, not awkward as some conductors
   insist.  And he believes a conductor must be a servant to the music,
   and not vice versa.

   "I read the music and it's like reading a book," he says.  "Everybody,
   of course, reads something else out of a piece.  That's natural.
   Art is completely subjective.  I don't think you should try to be
   more clever than the composer, or you should become a composer
   yourself.  If it doesn't work immediately, I have to find how it will
   work, and not change the composer.  This right and wrong doesn't
   exist in music."

   And there are times when music doesn't exist for Welser-Moest.  At
   his pastoral home amid cows and Alpine peaks in the tax-haven of
   Schaan, Liechtenstein, an hour's drive from Zurich, he allows no
   music to be discussed or played, especially his own recordings or
   taped performances.

   "I can't even put on the radio for music," says his wife, Angelika)or
   Geli - GAI-lee - as she is usually called).  "That's not a problem.
   He is often away.  And then I can listen to music."

   Welser-Moest, conductor-cum-regular guy, puts the matter another way:
   "The greatest thing for me, at home or anywhere else, is that there
   is none of this meastro business."

   His road to maestrodom certainly has traveled through numerous twists
   and turns.  Born Franz Lepold Maria Moest in 1960, he is the second
   youngest of five children (the youngest is his twin sister).  His
   father is a lung specialist and his mother a former member of the
   Austrian Parliament who received enough bad press to thicken the skin
   of any budding musician.

   Welser-Moest was brought up Catholic, but revolted as a teen ager.
   By this time, he was a proficient violinist, though he was destined
   for another career.  Schubert figures prominently in the transition.
   On the morning of Nov.  19, 1978, the 150th anniversary of the
   composer's death, Welser-Moest played a church performance of the
   Schubert's Mass in G major and then set off with three string colleagues
   to perform the "Trout" Quintet in Steyr, where Schubert wrote the
   piece.

   On the way, the musicians were involved in a car accident that sent
   Welser-Moest through the windshield and into the hospiatl with three
   broken vertebrae, damaged discs and two numb fingers on his left
   hand.  When he awoke one day soon thereafter, the first piece he
   heard on the radio was Schubert's Mass in G major.

   Welser-Moest doesn't put much stock in Schubertian symbolism, though
   he holds the composer's songs in higher regard than any other music.
   But the accident effectively detoured the 18-year old's musical life
   in a direction he had already had been heading.

   He was 16 when Balduin Culzer, the Austrian monk he considers his
   musical father, asked him to lead the school orchestra in a rehearsal
   of Mozart's Divertimento in F, K.138.

   "I don't know how," Welser-Moest said.

   "That's your problem," Culzer answered.

   "I stood in front of my colleagues," says Welser-Moest 22 years later,
   "and waved my arms and, surprisingly, they played!"

   Culzer, who attends all of his most renowned student's Zurich Opera
   productions, encouraged Welser-Moest to avoid the academic in music
   and focus on the emotional aspects, says the conductor.  "He told
   me, 'Music should have an impact on people.  It doesn't matter how
   you do it.'"

   Welser-Moest evidently learned how.  By the age of 25, he had conducted
   Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis," Verdi's "Requiem", Mahler's First
   Symphony and Schmidt's "Book with Seven Seals," among other mammoth
   works.  Culzer told Welser-Moest, who dropped out of a conducting
   course at the Munich Conservatory, that he would be wise to get over
   the fear of major works in his 20s rather than his 50s.  The young
   man listened.

   Making it to the finals of the Karajan Competition in 1979 not only
   brought Welser-Moest to the attention of the contest's namesake:  It
   landed him his first manager, Baron Andreas von Benningsen, a wealthy
   German-Swiss music lover living in Liechenstein.  In no time Benningsen
   contributed hyphenated mystique to his client's name by adding Welser
   to it in tribute to the town of Wels, nearl Linz, which is part of
   Moest family histor

   Byenningsen did something else.  He legally adopted the conductor,
   who says the practice "is not so unusual in Europe, especially in
   aristocratic circles." Welser-Moest, who married Benningsens's ex-wife
   Angelika, in 1995, won't go into any further detail about the father-son
   relationship, which has ended.  Since 1991, he has been represented
   by Edna Landau - "my Jewish mom" - at IMG Artists, the big New York
   management firm.

   In 1985, Welser-Moest's experience with the Austrian Youth Orchestra,
   the ensemble that developed from his school orchestra, led to his first
   professional symphonic posts in Norrkoeping, Sweden, and Winterthur,
   Switzerland.  A year later, the London Philharmonic called to ask
   him to substitute for the indisposed Jesus Lopez-Cobos in a Mozart
   program.  Welser-Moest thought about it for an hour and accepted the
   engagement.  The first rehearsal was the next day.

   "I studied the scores overnight," he says, with an impish grin.  "I
   hadn't done any of them.  That's what you call chutzpah." The concert
   went so well that the London Philharmonic hired him for a tour that
   the orchestra's cancellation-prone principal conductor, Klaus Tennstedt,
   had been scheduled to lead.  It cemented Welser-Moest's relationship
   with the ensemble, which four years later appointed him music director.

   Little went right.  Welser-Moest's programming was shot down.  The
   musicians, forced to work numerous other playing jobs to supplement
   pensions, delivered tired performances.  The critics hurled abuse
   and compared Welser-Moest with older, more seasoned conductors.

   "We simply heard him in the wrong repertorire," says critic Seckerson.
   "It really destroyed him.  I was one of the lone voices.  I was
   convinced we shouldn't have to listen to him in Brahms, Schubert and
   Beethoven.  Three years after leaving London for Zurich, Welser-Moest
   is close to recovering from the ordeal, which he puts in perspective.
   "There are things you have to learn in life, and sometimes they're
   hard," he says.  "But you have to live it.  What doesn't kill you
   makes you stronger."

   Zurich certainly has provided fortitude.  Opera director Pereira,
   who ran the Konzerthaus in Vienna before taking over in Zurich, says
   he needed a real leader to train the opera orchestra, which had fallen
   into a sorry state without a chief conductor for three years.  When
   Welser-Moest impressed Pereira and the orchestra as guest conductor
   for Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier" in 1993, the musicians pushed for
   his hiring.

   "The orchestra committee saw that something clicked," says Ada Pesch,
   one of the Zurich Opera's concertmasters, who grew up in Cleveland
   Heights and studied at Indiana University with Josef Gingold, the
   Cleveland Orchestra's former concertmaster.  "Franz is a man of few
   words.  He responds totally to what the orchestra needs - when to
   lead.  He's taught the orchestra to listen to each other, because he
   listens.  He's teaching the orchestra different styles.  He knows
   very much what he wants."

   What Welser-Moest wants, he evidently gets.  "The thing is, he is so
   great in performance," says Thomas Barthel an American pianist who
   serves as a vocal coach and assistant conductor at the Zurich Opera.
   "It's not only that he's completely there and concentrated.  It's
   walking into that territory that's on the edge."

   Another musician who has noticed Welser-Moest's effect on the Zurich
   Opera is Dohnanyi, who led productions at the opera house before his
   Cleveland successor became chief conductor.  The Cleveland Orchestra's
   music director returned to Zurich this month to conduct Verdi's "Un
   ballo in maschera."

   "The orchestra is totally different now and really motivated," says
   Dohnanyi.  "He most likely hired good people and made people really
   going for music.  That's what you feel."

   Werner Pfister, music critic of the Zurichsee-Zeitung, has been
   observing Welser-Moest since he led the 1993 "Rosenkavalier." He says
   Welser-Moest has brought a spirit of self-confidence to the orchestra,
   which is more consistent and flexible than ever.  Still, the conductor
   has plenty of room to grow.

   "His ears are not Dohnanyi ears," says Pfister.  "His way of working
   is of the younger generation, on a collegial basis.  How can anybody
   succeed Dohnanyi {in Cleveland}? It's impossible.  On the other hand,
   Welser-Moest can bring a very different personality.  He can succeed
   in a different way."

   Welser-Moest began seriously contemplating the potential for Cleveland
   success, as well as happiness, in early May, when he was approached
   about becoming music director,.He took a few days to think about his
   life as an Austrian who is rooted in middle European culture, customs
   and environment.  Could he endure extended periods away from the
   mountains and his bucolic homes in Liechtenstein and Attersee, Austria,
   near Salzburg? Could he take up the music directorship of another
   orchestra, albeit an American one? His feisty spirit, deeply wounded
   in London, triumphed over possible disappointment.

   "In my life, I never looked for the easy way out," Welser-Moest says.
   "Of course, one in a while you wake up in the middle of the night
   and think, 'Oh, my God.  It's three years away, but it's tomorrow.
   That's no time.' What am I going to say to the orchestra when I see
   them the next time?"

   By February, when he returns to Severance Hall, he'll know.
   Welser-Moest will have taken his hiking trip in the Dolomites, cleared
   his head and begun making plans for preserving and extending Cleveland
   traditions.  He wants the orchestra's educational program to reach
   out to more adults.  Breaking down barriers between the orchestra
   and listeneners will be part of his mission to develop audiences.

   Welser-Moest is particularly pleased that the passing of the baton
   in Cleveland in 2002 promises to be the smoothest in the orchestra's
   history.  Dohnanyi says he will be happy to answer any questions his
   successor poses.

   "Chistoph is fantastic," says Welser-Moest.  "We had lunch together
   and we talked about his experiences and he just laid it out for me.
   That doesn't usually happen.  Conductors are usually prima donnas.
   Not with he and me.  It's a beautiful relationship."

   Whether such a relationship extends to Welser-Moest and the orchestra
   remains to be seen and heard.  At the moment, he has no intentions
   of leaving Zurich when he takes over Cleveland, a situation opera
   director Pereira says should not worry Severance Hall:  "The fact he
   does two jobs means he's filling up his desire of being involved in
   his heart with this part of his lfie.  It will be a profit for
   Cleveland."

   Pereira also says Cleveland will need to make Welser-Moest feel
   conmfortable and wanted, so he doesn't suffer from homesickness.

   "I think Cleveland has some work to do, " says Pereira.  "There should
   be a warmhearted {welcome} and a good bit of patience.  If those two
   elements come together, this can be a great combination."

   Welser-Moest, survivor of symphonic wars in London and now eager to
   develop a partnership in Cleveland, sees the new opportunity as the
   greatest artistic challenge of his life.

   "I'm sure I will get a lot from them, and I'm hoping I can deliver
   something for them and to to them," he says.  "For me, everything is
   about understanding, which means it's about chamber music, no matter
   how many people are onstage.  That's what's exciting about them.
   They listen, and all music comes from that."

   And the new music director plans to take a relaxed view of his future
   in Cleveland.  When he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the
   first time last year, he joked - to the dismay of that august ensemble
   - that if he had never stood before these musicians, he still could
   have lived out his life happily.  He offers a variation on the theme
   for Cleveland.

   "If I hadn't gotten the j ob in Cleveland, I would be a happy man.
   I'm a happier man because I got the job."

   Now all Welser-Moest has to do is bring artistic happiness to Cleveland
   - and the rest of the musical world, which will be listening closely.

Mark Seeley <[log in to unmask]>