70 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
Honeck is known for his ability to revitalize nineteenth-century warhorses.
MUSICAL EVENTS
THE CLOSE READ
Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony dig deeper into classic scores.BYALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY AGOSTINO IACURCI
A
fter listening to the Pittsburgh
Symphony’s recent recording of
the Bruckner Ninth Symphony for the
tenth or eleventh time, I began plan-
ning a trip to Pittsburgh, in the hope
of understanding how such a formida-
ble achievement had come about. The
playing is, first of all, at a very high tech-
nical level; the Pittsburgh musicians can
withstand comparisons with their bet-
ter-paid counterparts in Boston, New
York, and Chicago. Yet note-perfect
performances are hardly unusual in an
age of impeccable conservatory train-
ing. What distinguishes this Bruckner
Ninth is the rare and disconcerting ex-
pressive power of the interpretation.
Savagely precise in detail, and almost
scarily sublime in cumulative effect, it
gives notice that the right orchestra and
the right conductor can unleash unsus-
pected energies in familiar works.
The right conductor, in this case, is
the sixty-one-year-old Austrian maestro
Manfred Honeck, who has been Pitts-
burgh’s music director since 2008. Un-
like such adventurous contemporaries as
Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen,
Honeck has made his name with nine-
teenth-century classics. In collabora-
tion with the Reference label, he and the
Pittsburgh Symphony have recorded Bee-
thoven’s Third, Fifth, and Seventh sym-
phonies, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, Dvořák’sEighth, and other meat-and-potatoes
fare. These releases are all worth hear-
ing; some, like the Bruckner Ninth, may
become standards by which future efforts
are measured. David Allen, writing in the
Times, is not the only critic to have com-
pared Honeck to Carlos Kleiber, perhaps
the most obsessively illuminating con-
ductor of the late twentieth century.
How do Honeck and the Pittsburgh
players do it? I wasn’t going to uncover
any deep secrets during a brief stop-
over, but a conversation with the con-
ductor and a visit to a couple of rehears-
als afforded some clues. Honeck is a
sunny-tempered man who grew up in a
small alpine town and is devoutly Cath-
olic. His approach to the core Austro-
German repertory is informed by a pro-
found knowledge of the traditions from
which the music sprang. At the same
time, as a former orchestral musician he
finds practical solutions to the weighty
questions he ponders in the scores. (Be-
fore he took up conducting, he was a vi-
olist in the Vienna Philharmonic.) Like
Kleiber, an idol of his youth, Honeck
plies his players with minute instruc-
tions, yet his attention to detail is in the
service of a cogent musical vision.
In an interview backstage at Heinz
Hall, where the orchestra performs,
Honeck summed up his philosophy. He
told me, “When I do a recording, when
I make any kind of performance, I want
two things: to show the identity of the
orchestra, and to show what I think about
the content of the score. I love this quote
from Gustav Mahler: ‘The most impor-
tant thing in music is not in the notes.’
What is the reason for this music? How
can I understand what it means in the
time in which it was written, and how
can I transport this idea into our own
time? With every bar, I have to think,
Why? Why a half note here? Why held
longer than before? Is it warm? Cold? If
I don’t ask these questions, it becomes
boring, a bad kind of routine.”
Honeck likes to tell stories about the
music that he conducts. These are not of
the clichéd “Fate knocking at the door”
variety; they often have to do with re-
gional cultures and rituals. He talks about
the different kinds of Austrian and Ba-
varian Ländler dances, and determines
which ones best apply to Bruckner or
Mahler. In the Scherzo of Schubert’s
Ninth Symphony, he hears an echo of