Cleve Scene: South African Soprano to Join Cleveland Orchestra for Performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs

“[Welser-Möst] told me he was ending his season with Cleveland and wanted to end it with people he loved working with,” she says. “He said he wanted to do Strauss. I thought, ‘That is the best thing anyone could say to me. It’s like he said, ‘I respect you as an artist, and I want to hear you doing something I like.’ The Strauss piece is a meditation on ending. It is about our end of days as people and how we meet our ending.”

Schultz describes it as “a love letter to the [Cleveland] Orchestra and this city with which he has such a deep relationship.” “I feel absolutely honored and thrilled to be part of that,” she says. “I also feel pressure. I want it to be a good memory. I want people to hear and feel through my performance the love he has for his orchestra and for Cleveland.”