Manfred Honeck is one of the leading conductors of our time. Since 2008 he has been music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. His contract was recently extended until 2032/33. Together with the orchestra he has appeared at venues and festivals including Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center in New York, the Salzburg Festival, the BBC Proms, the Musikfest Berlin, the Lucerne Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival, the Beethovenfest Bonn and the Grafenegg Festival. In autumn 2026 he will conduct the orchestra in concerts in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Lucerne and Vienna.
His recordings with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra include works by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Strauss and Tchaikovsky. Their recording of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Barber’s Adagio for Strings won a Grammy Award in 2018. In 2025 they released the album Requiem. Mozart’s Death in Words and Music.
Manfred Honeck began his conducting career as assistant to Claudio Abbado in Vienna and as the director of the Wiener Jeunesse Orchestra. Since then, he has been First Kapellmeister at the Zurich Opera House, one of the three principal conductors of the MDR Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo, principal guest conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and the Czech Philharmonic and music director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stockholm. In 2023 he was appointed honorary conductor of the Bamberg Symphony.
From 2007 to 2011 he was general music director of the Stuttgart State Opera, where he conducted works including operas by Berlioz, Mozart, Poulenc, Richard Strauss, Verdi and Wagner. His guest opera engagements have taken him to venues including the Semperoper Dresden, the Komische Oper Berlin, the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen and La Monnaie in Brussels. In 2020 he conducted Fidelio at the Theater an der Wien. His debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with Idomeneo followed in 2022.
As a guest conductor he has worked with famous orchestras including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Tonhalle Orchestra, Zurich, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the Vienna Philharmonic and the symphony orchestras of Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
In the 2026/27 season he will conduct numerous concerts to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of Beethoven, including the world premiere of Reinvere’s Schade! — Schade! — zu spät!! in Bamberg, Christus am Ölberge in Rome and several of Beethoven’s symphonies in Pittsburgh, London, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Cologne, Rotterdam and Vienna. He will also conduct a concert featuring Beethoven’s First Symphony and sacred works by Mozart, including the Requiem, at the Isarphilharmonie in Munich, Mahler’s First Symphony and Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony in Chicago and Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony in Dresden.
Manfred Honeck has received numerous awards and honorary doctorates. In February 2026 he was awarded the Kilenyi Bruckner Medal of Honor from the Bruckner Society of America.
