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“As an Austrian conductor,” Manfred Honeck says, “this music is very close to me, and I wanted to present pieces that are very deep in my tradition, but also are not very often played.”
Todd Rosenberg Photography
When Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck made his debut in Orchestra Hall, it was 2001, as the recently appointed music director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, which was on an American tour.
“They did bring with them a relatively new kid on the conducting block, 42-year-old Manfred Honeck, who took over the reins of the orchestra last fall,” wrote a critic in the Chicago Tribune at the time. “A onetime assistant to Claudio Abbado, Honeck seems to share his mentor’s attention to phrasing, a preference for sharp dynamic and rhythmic contrasts and a fondness for dramatic display.”
A year later, leaders of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra brought the conductor back to make his subscription debut with the ensemble during a set of concerts in February 2002; he quickly became a regular guest conductor. (Honeck first led the CSO at the Ravinia Festival in 1995.)
“Since that time, I’m very close to the orchestra and I love them, and I’m very thankful that we have a great musical relationship and also a human relationship,” said Honeck, now 66, who has served as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra since 2008.
The internationally recognized maestro will return March 13-15 to lead one of the CSO’s most unusual and adventurous programs of 2024-25, including two works that are receiving their first performances by the CSO.
For this outing, Honeck wanted to focus on what he called “Austrian classics,” and Cristina Rocca, the CSO’s vice president of artistic administration, readily agreed. “As an Austrian conductor,” he said, “this music is very close to me, and I wanted to present pieces that are very deep in my tradition, but also are not very often played.”
In the middle of the program will be Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21, which premiered in 1800. Although this piece is rooted in the classicism of Haydn and Mozart, it is revolutionary in its way and very much looks ahead to the composer’s later symphonies.
“Instead of doing Beethoven’s Ninth,” Honeck said, “why not do Beethoven’s First, which certainly with the Beethoven Eight is less performed? Everyone wants to hear the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth and the Sixth.” But he argues that the First has plenty to recommend it as well.
Culminating the program is a work by Haydn, who is certainly among the titans of classical music. But instead one of the composer’s oft-heard works like his popular symphonies or his oratorio, The Creation, Moneck will lead the composer’s Mass in Time of War (Missa in tempore belli).
The work, which the CSO has never performed before, is one of Haydn’s 14 mass settings. It was written in 1796 as the Austrians were mobilizing for an invasion by French troops as part of a four-year European war. “It also reflects a little of the time in which we are living now,” Honeck said, “because we are fortunate not be involved battling so much concretely, but the danger of a battle is always here.”
Although the mass was premiered elsewhere in Austria, it was later performed at the Piaristenkirche, a well-known 18th-century church in Vienna, where Honeck recalls visiting many times as a child.
“I love this piece very much,” he said. “It’s very unknown, but it provides a lot of beauty and hope, and it reflects our thinking about peace and war and about the human condition.”
Rounding out the program is the only work not by a Viennese composer, James MacMillan’s Larghetto for Orchestra, an instrumental arrangement of a setting of the Miserere, a text taken from Psalm 51; it was written for the London-based choral ensemble The Sixteen in 2009.
Honeck asked the Scottish-born MacMillan to create this orchestral version, which he premiered with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2017; he has championed it ever since, including performances later this month with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette music critic wrote this about the work following its debut: “MacMillan added a range of volume and feeling that no choir in the world can replicate. The composer treated the orchestra as multiple choirs, with strings, winds and brass each contributing chorale-like sections, as well as blending to create new shades of sound.”
