Manfred Honeck has firmly established himself as one of the world’s leading conductors. As music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where he has now started his eighteenth season, he continues to shape the ensemble’s artistic identity. His tenure, extended through the 2027/28 season, has seen the orchestra flourish artistically and as a cultural ambassador for the city of Pittsburgh, with guest appearances under his leadership at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York and the major venues and leading music festivals of Europe. For a nine-city European festivals tour in the summer of 2024, Pittsburgh was the only American orchestra at the Salzburg Festival.
Manfred Honeck’s tenure in Pittsburgh is extensively documented by a series of recordings on the Reference Recordings label that have received widespread critical acclaim, as well as multiple Grammy Award nominations and a win for Best Orchestral Performance in 2018. In August 2025 he and the orchestra released Requiem: Mozart’s Death in Words and Music, an original concept imagining a funeral mass for Mozart.
Born in Austria, Manfred Honeck completed his musical training at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. His experiences 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. He began his career as an 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, music director of the Norwegian National Opera, principal guest conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and chief conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stockholm. In 2023 he was appointed an honorary conductor by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra following decades of close collaboration.
In his four seasons as general music director of the Stuttgart State Opera, Manfred Honeck led premieres of works by Berlioz, Mozart, Poulenc, Strauss, Verdi, and Wagner. In 2022 he made his much-acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut. Beyond the podium, Manfred Honeck has created a series of symphonic suites, including Strauss’s Arabella, the latest, premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony in March 2025. He also has been artistic director of the International Concerts Wolfegg in Germany for over three decades.
This season, Honeck records Mahler’s Symphony no. 2 (Resurrection) and Bruckner’s Symphony no. 8 with the Pittsburgh Symphony and leads a variety of American orchestral music as part of celebrations around America’s 250th anniversary.
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 he was declared Artist of the Year by the jury of the International Classical Music Awards.
November 2025
Please note: Biographies are based on information provided to the CSO by the artists or their representatives. More current information may be available on websites of the artists or their management.
