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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, and 2007 saw the beginning of a ten-year residency in Miami. 2010/11 includes performances by Mr Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and Suntory Hall in Japan, and in 2011 they launch a biennial residency at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival, featuring The Cleveland Orchestra in Vienna State Opera productions.

With The Cleveland Orchestra, Mr Welser-Möst has presented eleven world and fourteen United States premieres, and in 2009 he led a production of The Marriage of Figaro which re-established The Cleveland Orchestra as an operatic ensemble. The series of Mozart/Da Ponte operas continued in 2009/10 with Così fan tutte and will conclude with Don Giovanni in 2010/11.

In June 2007, Mr 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 with director Sven-Eric Bechtolf. In the 2009/10 season he conducts Tannhäuser, Parsifal and further Ring performances, and in 2010/11 he conducts, among other performances, new productions of Cardillac and Katya Kabanova.

In recent years, Mr Welser-Möst has developed an increasingly close relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2010 he will conduct their Sommernacht concert in the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace, and in 2011 he conducts 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 including the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia. He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 1985, and was Music Director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1990-96.

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 led more than forty new productions - many of which were recorded on DVD by EMI - and toured to London, Paris, and Tokyo.

Mr 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.

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