The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall

The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall will be a symphony concert in the Friends of Music Hall on Tuesday 20 October 2026. The hall is in M1, the older of the two buildings of the concert hall on the Thessaloniki waterfront. The orchestra, from the American city of Cleveland, gave its first concert in December 1918. It will play under the Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst, its music director since 2002, who will step down in 2027 after 25 years in the post.

The evening will open with the Introduction and Finale from Richard Strauss’s opera Daphne. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony, in C minor, will follow. Shostakovich wrote it in the summer of 1943, during the Second World War.

The Thessaloniki Concert Hall opened on 2 January 2000 and is the concert’s organiser. Thessaloniki will be the 14th of 15 concerts on the orchestra’s 2026 European tour, played between 2 and 21 October. The tour will close the next night, 21 October, at the Megaron in Athens.