Franz Welser-Möst

“Making music today can only be done in a spirit of togetherness,” says the Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst in his autobiography From Silence. And yet, in the course of a career that has taken him from Bruckner’s birthplace of Linz (where a car accident ended youthful dreams of a career as a violinist) to his current position since 2002 as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, he’s built a reputation as a quiet but fiercely determined idealist and is unafraid of innovation in the service of music. That was evident in his first major conducting post, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1990-96). Like Mahler and Karajan before him, he fine-tuned his art with stints in major opera houses (Zurich, 1995-2008, and the Vienna Staatsoper, 2007-14). In Cleveland his commitment to new music and opera alongside the Austro-German symphonic canon has attracted one of the youngest audiences in the USA, and he’s also won the respect of the Vienna Philharmonic, which has repeatedly invited him to conduct its celebrated New Year’s Concert. Today, Welser-Möst seems to be that rarest thing—a genuinely energizing artist who understands that tradition is about the future as well as the past.