Franz Welser-Möst is back with Cleveland Orchestra after cancer surgery and slipped disk
ABC News
Franz Welser-Möst is back on the Cleveland Orchestra’s podium, concentrating again on music instead of his health
NEW YORK -- NEW YORK (AP) — Franz Welser-Möst is back on the Cleveland Orchestra's podium, concentrating again on music instead of his health.
“It was not my best year, the last year," he said Wednesday. “I feel good. You learn to live with the circumstances, and I'm extremely and grateful that I'm back at work.”
On track to surpass George Szell as Cleveland's longest-tenured music director, the 63-year-old Austrian returned to his orchestra at Cleveland's Severance Music Center last week and leads it in a pair of programs at Carnegie Hall this weekend. He will be in Austria for five concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic in late February, then leads that orchestra on a seven-concert tour in early March to New York and Naples and West Palm Beach, Florida.
Quite a schedule, given his setbacks in 2023.
He had a slipped disk in his neck while conducting Wagner's four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)” at the Vienna State Opera in June, an injury that caused him to enter an orthopedic clinic in the second half of July and again in August. He was forced to cancel a high-profile new production of Verdi's “Macbeth” at the Salzburg Festival.
