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Manfred Honeck has firmly established himself as one of the world’s leading conductors, whose distinctive and revelatory interpretations receive great international acclaim. As Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where his contract runs through the 2027-2028 season, he has entered his 17th season. Celebrated at home and abroad, he and the orchestra continue to serve as cultural ambassadors for the city of Pittsburgh. Guest appearances include Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, as well as the major venues of Europe and leading festivals such as the BBC Proms, Salzburg Festival, Musikfest Berlin, Lucerne Festival, Rheingau Music Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, and Grafenegg Festival. In summer 2024, he leads the Pittsburgh Symphony in a nine-city European Festivals Tour, starting with their appearance as the only American orchestra at the prestigious Salzburg Festival and concluding at Vienna Konzerthaus.

Manfred Honeck's successful work in Pittsburgh is being 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 recording, Bruckner's Symphony No. 7, paired with Resurrexit by Mason Bates, was released in July 2024 to great critical acclaim.

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. In November 2023, he was appointed Honorary Conductor by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, following decades of close collaboration.

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 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, Dvořák’s Rusalka as well as Puccini's Turandot which he regularly performs around the globe. The most recent arrangement, of Strauss’s Salome, was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2023.

As a guest conductor, Manfred Honeck has worked with all leading international orchestras, 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 thirty years.

In 2024-2025, Manfred Honeck will conduct fourteen wide-ranging programs and several special projects in Pittsburgh, including all four of the season's world premieres and commissions. He also will return to the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Concertgebouworkest Amsterdam, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, amongst others. In Bruckner's anniversary year of 2024, he will continue to place a special focus on the music of this composer.

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".

Heralded as “one of the finest organists and teachers of our day,” by Zachary
Woolfe of The New York Times, “one of the major musicians of our
time” by Alex Ross of The New Yorker, and as “America’s leading organ
performer” by The Economist, the internationally celebrated organist
Paul Jacobs combines a probing intellect and extraordinary technical
mastery with an unusually large repertoire, both old and new. He has performed
to great critical acclaim on five continents and in each of the fifty United
States. The only organist ever to have won a Grammy Award—in 2011 for
Messiaen’s towering "Livre du Saint-Sacrément"—Mr. Jacobs is an eloquent
champion of his instrument both in the United States and abroad.

Mr. Jacobs has transfixed audiences, colleagues, and critics alike with
landmark performances of the complete works for solo organ by J.S. Bach and
Messiaen. A fierce advocate of new music, Mr. Jacobs has premiered works by
Samuel Adler, Mason Bates, Michael Daugherty, Bernd Richard Deutsch, John
Harbison, Wayne Oquin, Stephen Paulus, Christopher Theofanidis, and
Christopher Rouse, among others. As a teacher, he has also been a vocal
proponent of the redeeming nature of traditional and contemporary classical
music.

No other organist is repeatedly invited as a soloist to perform with
prestigious orchestras, thus making him a pioneer in the movement for the
revival of symphonic music featuring the organ. Mr. Jacobs regularly appears
with the Chicago Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Edmonton
Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Los Angeles
Philharmonic, Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Montreal
Symphony, Nashville Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Symphony,
Phoenix Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Toledo
Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic, and Utah Symphony, among others. Mr. Jacobs
studied at the Curtis Institute of Music with organist John Weaver and
harpsichordist Lionel Party, and at Yale University with Thomas Murray. He
joined the faculty of The Juilliard School in 2003 and was named chairman of
the organ department in 2004, one of the youngest faculty appointees in the
school’s history. He received Juilliard’s prestigious William Schuman
Scholar’s Chair in 2007. In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from
Washington and Jefferson College. In 2021, The American Guild of Organists
named him recipient of the International Performer of the Year Award. Mr.
Jacobs has written several articles for
The Wall Street Journal.

Photo Credit: Prescilla C. Scott