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]>
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