Honeck conducted the PSO for the first time only last season. But the chemistry between maestro and musicians was evidently extraordinary from the start. "It is no exaggeration to say that the orchestra and I got on like a house on fire," Honeck said in a statement; PSO board chairman Dick Simmons told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "In the 16 years I have been associated with this orchestra, I have never heard the overwhelming endorsement of a conductor by the musicians [like the one they gave to Honeck], and that includes some pretty high-level conductors."
One potential concern for the orchestra, according to the Post-Gazette's Andrew Druckenbrod, was Honeck's relatively low profile (so far) in the U.S. However, the paper points out, the PSO's last music director, Mariss Jansons, was not yet a big-name conductor when he came to the job in 1996; he is now one of the more revered maestros working today, and the music director of two of the world's finest ensembles, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and the Bavarian Radio Symphony.
"That hire proved to be one of the best in PSO history," Druckenbrod wrote, "and the orchestra feels it again has caught lightning in a bottle."
Born into a family of nine children in a small Austrian town in 1958, Manfred Honeck began his professional career in 1983 as a violinist and violist with the Vienna Philharmonic — to which he has returned as a guest conductor more than once. He has also led (among others) the Los Angeles and London Philharmonics, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestras, and the Chicago and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestras. Last summer he concluded a widely admired six-year tenure as music director of the Swedish Radio Symphony; in addition to his new PSO job, Honeck is Music Director Designate of the Staatsoper Stuttgart and Principal Guest Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic.
His peripatetic career notwithstanding, Honeck makes his home with his wife and six children in Atlach, Austria, not far from his birthplace.
