Franz Welser-Möst conducts Strauss and Shostakovich — With Golda Schultz

The Cleveland Orchestra, "America's finest," makes a highly anticipated stop in the City of Lights with the esteemed Franz Welser-Möst (in the final months of his celebrated 25-year tenure as the orchestra's music director), inviting acclaimed South African soprano Golda Schultz for Richard Strauss's spectacularly poignant Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) and taking on Shostakovich's magnificent Eighth Symphony. All four songs in Strauss's final vocal set, the product of an 84-year-old master fully aware of his impending mortality, count among the most moving in the entire repertoire, and here we have the pleasure of hearing them sung by Schultz, "one of the most golden, rich-toned voices of her generation" (Opera). Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8, written during World War II, has been called his most tragic work — though the composer attempted to paint it as more optimistic, writing that its "philosophical conception … can be summed up in three words: life is beautiful. All that is dark and evil will rot away, and beauty will triumph." The troublingly ambiguous Eighth was banned for years in the USSR before being rehabilitated in the 1950s, and it is now often considered one of Shostakovich's greatest works.

Photo © Vittorio Greco