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Franz Welser-Möst Conductor

Music Director, Cleveland Orchestra
General Music Director Designate, Vienna Staatsoper

Franz Welser-Möst has been Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra since September 2002. Only nine months into his initial five-year term, his contract was extended through the 2011/12 season, and in June 2008 a further extension was announced which will see him continue at the orchestra's helm until their centennial year in 2018. He and the orchestra have close relationships with Carnegie Hall in New York, the Musikverein in Vienna and the Lucerne Festival. In 2008 they were resident at the Salzburg Festival, giving five performances of Rusalka as well as performing three symphonic programmes. In 2007, Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra began a ten-year residency at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, Florida.

In June 2007, Welser-Möst was appointed General Musikdirektor Designate of the Vienna Staatsoper; he takes up the position from the beginning of the 2010/11 season. His long partnership with the company has included acclaimed performances of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and during the 2007/8 and 2008/9 seasons he undertook a new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle.

In the course of a long association with the Zurich Opera, Franz Welser-Möst served as Chief Conductor from 1995-2002, Principal Conductor from 2002-5, and from 2005-8 as the company’s General Musikdirektor. During this time, Welser-Möst conducted more than fifty premieres with the Zurich Opera, many of which were recorded on DVD by EMI, and toured to London, Paris, and Tokyo.

In recent years Franz Welser-Möst has developed an increasingly close relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and in 2011 he will conduct the orchestra’s celebrated New Year’s Concert. In 2009 he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals, at the BBC Proms in London, and in a special concert in Vienna to mark the 150th anniversary of the Vienna Singverein. Franz Welser-Möst also appears regularly with the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, and has conducted all the major U.S. orchestras. He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 1985, and was Music Director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1990-96.

Welser-Möst’s recordings, both on CD and on DVD, have won a number of major awards, including the Gramophone Award, the Diapason d’Or, the Japanese Record Academy Award and two Grammy nominations. Recent DVD releases include Zurich Opera productions of Der Rosenkavalier, La bohème, Fierrabras, Don Giovanni and Peter Grimes for EMI, and Bruckner’s Symphonies number 5, 7 and 9 with The Cleveland Orchestra. Recent CD releases include a live recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with The Cleveland Orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon. EMI recently re-issued five double-CD sets of recordings with the London Philharmonic Orchestra as “The Welser-Möst Edition”.

Franz Welser-Möst is an honorary member of the Vienna Singverein and has been awarded the Silver Medal of the Region of Upper Austria. He was named Conductor of the Year by Musical America in 2003, and is the co-author of Cadences: Observations and Conversations, published in 2007.

Biography correct as at 23 December 2009 – please destroy any previously dated versions


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