Franz Welser-Möst is back with Cleveland Orchestra after cancer surgery and slipped disk

NEW YORK (AP) — Franz Welser-Möst is back on the Cleveland Orchestra's podium, concentrating again on music instead of his health.

“It was not my best year, the last year," he said Wednesday. “I feel good. You learn to live with the circumstances, and I'm extremely and grateful that I'm back at work.”

On track to surpass George Szell as Cleveland's longest-tenured music director, the 63-year-old Austrian returned to his orchestra at Cleveland's Severance Music Center last week and leads it in a pair of programs at Carnegie Hall this weekend. He will be in Austria for five concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic in late February, then leads that orchestra on a seven-concert tour in early March to New York and Naples and West Palm Beach, Florida.

Quite a schedule, given his setbacks in 2023.

He had a slipped disk in his neck while conducting Wagner's four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)” at the Vienna State Opera in June, an injury that caused him to enter an orthopedic clinic in the second half of July and again in August. He was forced to cancel a high-profile new production of Verdi's “Macbeth” at the Salzburg Festival.

Welser-Möst had surgery Sept. 1 to remove a cancerous tumor from his bladder and came back to Cleveland to conduct the orchestra's season opener on Sept. 28. After leading two weeks of programs there, he took the orchestra to Vienna and Linz for their 21st international tour together, then had a second operation on Oct. 25.

That was followed in November by six weeks of once-a-week immunotherapy treatment. He is scheduled for additional three-week cycles of treatment in March, July and October.

“The doctors are very happy. So am I, that it seems to work. It has been in my family, so it’s genetic,” Welser-Möst said. “Both my...