by Kevin McLaughlin
Franz Welser-Möst began saying farewell to Cleveland audiences on Saturday with music from his other home.
“Summer in Vienna” marked his final Blossom Music Center appearance as music director of The Cleveland Orchestra, in the 25th and final season of a tenure that began in 2002. Richard Strauss and Mozart brought Vienna’s drama and grace to the party. After intermission came the champagne.
Welser-Möst flipped our wigs with the emphatic opening to Mozart’s Symphony No. 34, letting the four horns and four trumpets play with Handelian abandon while strings and winds kept the music transparent and nimble. Mozart’s abrupt shifts and odd phrase lengths came off as witty, not fussy. The finale was like a fleet horse ride, all carefree bliss at summer’s end.
Opera has figured prominently in Welser-Möst’s Cleveland tenure, and Richard Strauss’s Daphne has a history here. In 2015, he led a staged production of the opera at Severance. On Saturday, he returned to it in two substantial excerpts — the opening Introduction and the final transformation scene.
Though stripped of lighting and scenic elements at Blossom, the music still conjured much of the opera’s pastoral atmosphere and mounting drama. Frank Rosenwein captured the nymph’s arboreal ecstasy in plaintive, luminous oboe solos. Strauss opera may be Welser-Möst’s wheelhouse, and Cleveland will be reminded of that in May, when he conducts Die Frau ohne Schatten at Severance — the last fully staged opera of his tenure.
Johann Strauss Jr.’s overture and ballet music from The Carnival in Rome began a sequence of nostalgic operetta and dance music that had the audience dreaming of a Vienna that may never have existed, and of places they may never have visited. Rome came with tarantella rhythms and birdcalls. The entr’acte from A Night in Venice imagined the floating city through a Viennese lens of ballrooms, waltzes, and easy pleasures.
Welser-Möst kept rhythms dancing and accents crisp, finding just enough elasticity in the pulse — that elusive Wiener Schwung — without sacrificing forward motion. Woodwinds and strings traded characterful turns as the orchestra moved easily between theatrical sparkle and ballroom elegance. His long association with the Vienna Philharmonic, including three New Year’s Concerts, gives him unusual authority in this repertory.
Johann Strauss’s Bauern-Polka offered plenty of rustic bounce. In the refrain, the orchestra broke into unison “la-la-las,” drawing a smile even from the usually reserved Maestro. Josef Strauss’s Friedenspalmen Walzer, written after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, breathed more expansively, its melancholy emerging naturally instead of being pressed for sentiment.
The Quadrille from The Gypsy Baron, complete with a tutti orchestral “Hey!” at the end, sent everyone off in high spirits. Four curtain calls invoked no encore, not even the de rigueur Blue Danube. The affection for Welser-Möst was obvious, though he deflected that toward the musicians — a consolation and a reminder that this was not yet the end of an era.
Photo by Yevhen Gulenko
Published on ClevelandClassical.com, September 2, 2026
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