Portrait Manfred Honeck

Manfred Honeck

Conductor
© Felix Broede
General Management

Manfred Honeck has firmly established himself as one of the world’s leading conductors, whose distinctive and revelatory interpretations receive great international acclaim. He is now in his 15th season as Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where his contract was extended last year to run through the 2027-2028 season. Celebrated at home and abroad, he and the orchestra continue to serve as cultural ambassadors for the city of Pittsburgh. Guest appearances regularly include Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, as well as the major venues of Europe and festivals such as the BBC Proms, Salzburg Festival, Musikfest Berlin, Lucerne Festival, Rheingau Music Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, and Grafenegg Festival. In August and September 2022, they will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the orchestra’s first international tour with three weeks of concerts in Europe.

Manfred Honeck's successful work in Pittsburgh is extensively documented by recordings on the Reference Recordings label, featuring works by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Shostakovich, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and others. They have received a multitude of outstanding reviews and awards, including many GRAMMY® nominations, and he and the orchestra won the GRAMMY® for "Best Orchestral Performance" in 2018. The most recent release, Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, coupled with Stucky's "Silent Spring", was an “Editor’s Choice” of Gramophone.

Born in Austria, Manfred Honeck completed his musical training at the University of Music in Vienna. His many years of experience as a member of the viola section in the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera Orchestra have had a lasting influence on his work as a conductor, and his art of interpretation is based on his determination to venture deep beneath the surface of the music. He began his conducting career as assistant to Claudio Abbado and as director of the Vienna Jeunesse Orchestra. Subsequently, he was engaged by the Zurich Opera House, where he was awarded the European Conducting Prize in 1993. He has since served as one of three principal conductors of the MDR Symphony Orchestra Leipzig, as Music Director of the Norwegian National Opera, Principal Guest Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and Chief Conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stockholm.

Manfred Honeck also has a strong profile as opera conductor. In his four seasons as General Music Director of the Staatsoper Stuttgart, he conducted premieres of operas by Berlioz, Mozart, Poulenc, Strauss, Verdi, and Wagner. He has also appeared as guest at leading houses such as the Semperoper Dresden, Komische Oper Berlin, Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Royal Opera of Copenhagen, and the Salzburg Festival. In 2020, Beethoven’s anniversary year, he conducted a new staging of Fidelio (1806 version) at the Theater an der Wien. In autumn 2022, he made his much-acclaimed debut at the Metropolitan opera in New York, leading a revival of Mozart’s Idomeneo. Beyond the podium, Manfred Honeck has designed a series of symphonic suites, including Janáček’s Jenůfa, Strauss’s Elektra and Dvořák’s Rusalka, all of which he recorded with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and regularly performs around the globe. The most recent arrangement, of Strauss’s Salome, was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in April 2023.

As a guest conductor, Manfred Honeck has worked with the leading international orchestras around the globe, including Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Staatskapelle Dresden, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Accademia di Santa Cecilia Rome and the Vienna Philharmonic. In the United States, he has conducted all major US orchestras, including New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony. He has also been Artistic Director of the International Concerts Wolfegg in Germany for more than twenty-five years.

Manfred Honeck holds honorary doctorates from several universities in the United States and was awarded the honorary title of Professor by the Austrian Federal President. In 2018, the jury of the International Classical Music Awards declared him "Artist of the Year".




10. June 2023 - 20:00

Pittsburgh, Heinz Hall

Stacy Garrop: Forging Steel
George Gershwin: Konzert in F für Klavier und Orchester
Richard Strauss (arr. M. Honeck/Th. Ille): Salome: Suite for Orchestra
Maurice Ravel: Bolero

Info & Tickets



11. June 2023 - 14:30

Pittsburgh, Heinz Hall

Stacy Garrop: Forging Steel
George Gershwin: Konzert in F für Klavier und Orchester
Richard Strauss (arr. M. Honeck/Th. Ille): Salome: Suite for Orchestra
Maurice Ravel: Bolero

Info & Tickets



14. June 2023 - 19:30

Pittsburgh, Heinz Hall

Wynton Marsalis: Fanfare for Brass and Percussion
Stacy Garrop: Forging Steel
Edouard Lalo: Sinfonie Espagnole d-moll op. 21 für Violine und Orchester
Igor Strawinsky: Feuervogel Suite Nr. 2 von 1919
Maurice Ravel: Bolero

Info & Tickets



  • Der letzte Abend der Salzburger Festspiele wird zum Triumph für Manfred Honeck und das Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra ... In der langsamen Einleigung von Mahlers Erster könnte man eine Stecknadel fallen hören. Man merkt Honeck die Leidenschaft für diese Musik an, mit der er den Kopfsatz bis ins letzte Details modelliert ... Dynamische Kontaste werden zugespitzt, die Rubati lustvoll ausgekostet. ... Ebenso detailgenau wie in der Mahler-Interpretation führt Honeck sein Orchester auch durch Ligetis "Lontano", das sich in der dynamischen Feinarbeit zu einem faszinierend schillernden Klanggebilde formt.
    Salzburger Nachrichten
    Florian Oberhummer, Salzburger Nachrichten, 01.09.2022
  • In Mahler’s first symphony, Pittsburgh showed that it can be at least Viennese as it is American. Honeck, conducting without a score, shows more interest in Mahler’s black, biting humour than he does in anything numinous. His Mahler, attentive to the score’s many tempo indications, has both velvet delicacy and sledge-hammer violence. It is spectacular without being cultish; Honeck revels in the score’s sardonic moments, but also lets us glimpse vulnerability between the bar-lines. ... Together, they can find depth and nuance in a score, and explore the acoustic vagaries of the world’s leading concert halls.
    slippedisc.com
    Shirley Apthorp, slippedisc.com, 25.08.2022
  • Honeck, ein österreichischer Gentleman mit einem Orchester in Pittsburgh, wirft sich in das Werk ohne jede Zurückhaltung, glättet nach einigen Minuten die Wogen, liefert mit den Philharmonikern einen ungeheuer klaren Bruckner ab, geht mit der alpenländischen Star-Wars-Musik des Schlusssatzes an die Grenzen der Akustik, erschafft im Adagio eine Schönheit, in der man verloren gehen möchte.
    Süddeutsche Zeitung
    Egbert Tholl, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19.03.2022
  • Of course the performance of the concerts’s three works, led with great elan and specificity by guest conductor Manfred Honeck […] was superb. […] A complex, dreamy ache marked the start of the third movement with its superbly subtle musical shadings overseen by Honeck and all sections of the orchestra before a sense of frantic nervousness spread through the music. […] Stunning, from start to finish.



Lothar Schacke

Lothar Schacke

Director, General Management
e-mail
+49 89 44488790
Eva Oswalt

Eva Oswalt

Operations Manager
e-mail
+49 89 44488796