Franz Welser-Möst conducts Schubert, Deutsch and Strauss

Franz Schubert played the viola for many years in violinist Otto Hatwig’s amateur orchestra, an ensemble that performed exclusively in private settings and primarily played symphonies by Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven. These works were important models for Schubert, including for his Third Symphony, whose initially sombre mood – pastoral, lyrical and extremely melodic – is soon replaced by airy staccatos and a buffo Rossini-esque tone.

Franz Welser-Möst, long-time music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, then presents Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch’s Intensity, which is dedicated to Welser-Möst. The composer explains that the three-part work, completed in 2020, is based on “three main themes and two basic chords,” with the second chord borrowed from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition movement The Old Castle. As in Mussorgsky’s musical museum visit, Intensity also features a trumpet motif that serves as the nucleus for the development of the themes.

The programme concludes with a suite from Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, compiled by Franz Welser-Möst himself: a melancholic retrospective on the fading world of the monarchy, in which all the typical figures of the Austro-Hungarian Empire make their final appearance to the ironic and nostalgic sounds of the waltz.