In preparation for the Cleveland Orchestra’s series of performances at Lincoln Center next week, the New York Times has published a piece on the mercurial Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra. We got a huge kick out of it.
Cleveland’s storied ensemble has, according to Times’ classical music editor Zachary Woolfe, a “plausible claim” to being the best in America.
While focusing primarily on Welser-Möst and his “highs and lows” with the baton, to say nothing of his yoga routine, the piece also is optimistic about the future of the Orchestra. Fundraising is high, Woolfe writes, and the organization posted a $1 million surplus 2014.
Also included is a summary of the local feud between Welser-Möst and his nemesis, the former Plain Dealer music critic Donald Rosenberg, a man who turned “from biographer into pariah” with the current conductor’s appointment.
“The dispute still rankles,” writes Woolfe. “Mr. Rosenberg declined to discuss the matter. And asked if, several years on, he had any comment on the situation, Mr. Welser-Möst stared icily at a reporter and replied: ‘Nothing. I never think about that again.'”
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2015.
When a reviewer allows a massive ego to move his pen on paper and fingers on a keyboard…..and starts believing that readers wait on bended knee, hoping that he briefly displays the golden key that opens the magical chest of universal truth — the journalistic outcome may look good in parts, but the raw sewage smell is overwhelming.