An interview with

Franz Welser-möst

Why pair recent commissions with classic repertoire? Cleveland actually plays more contemporary music than a lot of other orchestras and we wanted to give a glimpse of what we do throughout the season. These are pieces we really believe in and which we’ve enjoyed playing. You don’t have to play the same stuff over and over again; there’s so much great music, and if you play it on a level like this orchestra does, it’s compelling and enjoyable. That’s the message of the three discs.

It must have been tough to choose what to put on them? Yes it was, because every time we talked about it we would think of things we’d have to miss out. We’re sitting on tons of recordings, actually, because we record everything for our archives. Since we improved the quality of our recordings, there is a lot of stuff we’ve thought would be great to put out.

Hence the new label…

We looked at what other orchestras do – like the London Symphony and others – and we felt it was the right way to go. We have control over what we are putting out there; otherwise, you can run into compromises which you don’t want to make, plus we can do things on our terms.

What are your hopes for Cleveland’s next century?

When we approached the centenary I said we should come up with a vision for our community first. So it is that in 100 years, every child in Cleveland should be touched by music. That’s a huge goal, but 20 per cent of our audience is under 25 and that makes us optimistic that we are at least going in the right direction.