In Friday’s New York Times (7/10), Zachary Woolfe profiles Franz Welzer-Möst, music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, which performs three programs at Lincoln Center Festival in New York City next week. In October, the orchestra “announced that Mr. Welser-Möst would extend his contract until 2022. If all goes as planned, his tenure will have lasted 20 years.… In its self-effacing virtuosity and variety of colors, its refinement and chamber-style cohesion, the orchestra has a plausible claim to being the best in America. … As it approaches the centenary of its founding in 1918, the ensemble is at a moment of transition.… One of the orchestra’s signature initiatives recently has been searching for audiences and donors outside Cleveland, particularly through a multiweek annual residency in Miami.… A brief players’ strike in 2010 was a reminder that the challenges endemic to the industry.… But the orchestra posted a surplus of nearly $1 million on a budget of $48.7 million for fiscal year 2014, its first since 2001.… Joshua Smith, the principal flutist since 1990, [said] there is ‘a sense of adventure that’s in the institution now that was never there before.’ ”
Posted July 10, 2015
