RICHARD WAGNER

DIE MEISTERSINGER
VON NÜRNBERG




L'AVANT-SCÈNE-OPÉRA





© KLAUS RUDOLPH

For the 45-year-old Austrian, the current West Coast tour is a chance to show off his developing partnership with one of the nation's most revered ensembles. To hear him tell it, Welser-Möst's goal has been to leaven his orchestra's formidable technical prowess with a looser, more communicative touch.
I'm not the old type of conductor, he said. I try to live in the 21st century. The Cleveland Orchestra has always that drive for perfection, but I think music-making also has a lot to do with freedom and how you use that freedom.
Perfection is a great thing, but it has to serve a purpose. We also have to relate emotionally to the audience, in an experience we share together. It's not a circus act. This emotional side of the music making is something the orchestra had to get used to.
Welser-Möst's appointment to succeed Dohnányi raised eyebrows in musical circles. He was young and relatively inexperienced, and he had come off an unhappy six-year stint as music director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra that was marked by scathing reviews and poor rapport with the musicians (who nicknamed him Frankly Worse Than Most).
But his combination of warmth and tonal clarity seems to be winning over his detractors, and recent reviews have tended to praise the orchestra's performances of traditional and contemporary works alike.
Welser-Möst looks back with a certain rueful candor on the earlier period, when he says he succumbed to the lure of the international jet-setting career.
I was working 50 weeks a year, trying to do this and that and everything, and it backfires. You get sick. You have to listen to your body, and at some point you understand that career is not everything.
In addition to his Cleveland post, Welser-Möst is also principal conductor of the
Zurich Opera, and guest-conducts regularly in Berlin, Vienna and Munich. But he makes sure to take at least 12 weeks off each year to keep himself rested.
Welser-Möst's career as a conductor began as a result of a near-fatal accident. Born in Linz, he trained originally as a violinist and pianist. But at 18, on his way to a performance, his car skidded off an icy road and Welser- Möst wound up in intensive care for months.
The crash, he says, taught him to be hesitant about announcing long-term goals, either for himself or the orchestra. In the nearer term, it left him with permanent nerve damage in his left hand that scuttled any hope of a career as an instrumentalist. On recovering, he threw himself into conducting as the only way of retaining his relationship with music.
But for all his devotion to music, Welser-Möst seems intent on making room in his life for plenty of other activities. He and his wife maintain homes in her native Liechtenstein as well as in Cleveland and rural Austria, and he is clearly not a conductor whose existence begins and ends with scores.

Mit dieser höchst populären Wagner-Oper (in Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround-Sound) erweitert sich der EMI Classics-Katalog durch ein weiteres Highlight des Musiktheaters in Starbesetzung.
José van Dam als Hans Sachs, Matti Salminen als Veit Pogner, Michael Volle als Sixtus Beckmesser, Peter Seiffert als Stolzing: Schon allein diese Namen garantieren eine Einspielung, die als Dokument in die Geschichte eingehen wird. „Eine Aufführung, die nichts zu wünschen übrig ließ und die auch den weiten Weg auf die Südseite des Rheines voll gerechtfertigt hat!", schrieb der Opernkritiker Ralf-Jochen Ehresmann über die Produktion, in der der Regisseur zwar an der spätmittelalterlichen Welt der Handlung anknüpft, die Atmosphäre aber wie in einer Zeitreise der Figuren verändert und ihr neue Bedeutungs-schichten abgewinnt. Wagner besitzt gerade in Zürich eine besondere Tradition, seit hier 1913 der Parsifal erstmals außerhalb von Bayreuth zu erleben war.
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Auch Dirigent Franz Welser-Möst versuchte immer wieder, die Musik vom Pomp zu befreien, sie neu zu hören: spontaner, ehrlicher, aufregender hat man die vielen Facetten dieser grandiosen Partitur selten gehört. V. BOSER

Die neue Zürcher Produktion der «Meistersinger» unter der musikalischen Leitung von Franz Welser-Möst wurde an der Premiere vom Dienstag zu einem Sängertriumph ersten Ranges. Endlich, endlich wieder ein Wagner-Tenor, der diesen Namen verdient! In der Rolle des intuitiv die Regeln der Meistersinger-Kunst erneuernden Ritters Walther von Stolzing sang Peter Seiffert seine Seele aus dem Leib. Mit grossartigen Steigerungen beseelte er die weitatmigen Phrasen, wagte dabei das Orgiastische und behielt doch immer die Kontrolle über seine Stimme. ZÜRCHER OBERLÄNDER