A CONDUCTOR’S TALE

Manfred Honeck has worked hard to develop the Pittsburgh Symphony’s ‘distinctive clarity of tone’

PHOTOS ED DEARMITT / PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

I meet Manfred Honeck on a bright summer morning in the Biergarten of the Hotel Gasthof zur Post, the only hotel in the small town of Wolfegg in southern Germany. The previous night, Honeck conducted Beethoven’s Missa solemnis as part of the Internationale Wolfegger Konzerte festival, and our conversation is interrupted several times by townspeople coming to congratulate him on the performance. Honeck has been artistic director of the festival since 1994. He is also local to the area, his family home being just across the border in Austria. ‘Every time I come to this town, I feel everybody is involved,’ says Honeck. ‘There used to be a grocery store over there, and the owner would play the organ. Yesterday the cook of the Gasthof came to thank me for the Missa solemnis, as he was there with his daughter. This has always felt to me like a festival that I could really identify with.’

Wolfegg is also home to royalty: its Renaissance castle is the ancestral seat of the princes of Waldburg-Wolfegg. The festival was founded in 1989 by the former prince, Max Willibald, and is now hosted by his heirs, Prince Johannes and his wife, Princess Viviana. Concerts are held in the banqueting hall and the ornate great hall of the castle, as well as in the adjoining Rococo church. There is a long tradition of music making at Wolfegg Castle, and in the 18th century the family retained a court orchestra. Today, visiting ensembles take their place: this year the Berlin-based Ensemble Mini as well as the Bamberg Symphony.

The festival usually includes a large-scale choral work, but the Missa solemnis was particularly ambitious. ‘I thought this was the right piece to celebrate 30 years of the festival,’ says Honeck. ‘It is very challenging, but we have the Bamberg Symphony, a wonderful orchestra, as well as the Munich Philharmonic Choir, who are now regular guests here – they have such fantastic diction. It is such a complicated piece and so challenging, but the cook here loved the concert! Perhaps he didn’t understand every aspect of the music, but he and his daughter said they were blown away by its power.’

The Pittsburgh Symphony’s string sound draws on its performing history and Honeck’s own experience as a violinist and violist

Honeck is best known today as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, whose world-class status he has consolidated over the past decade. But he never forgets his Austrian roots: he was born in Nenzing in 1958, and has spent much of his life in Vienna. ‘You cannot ignore your own history. I am from Vienna and I will not deny that. I have a Viennese style of thinking.’ His goal was always to be a conductor, but his route to the podium was via the violin and then the viola. Honeck studied the violin at the Vienna Music Academy. When a viola position became vacant in the Vienna Philharmonic, he learnt the instrument in just a few months and went on to play the viola with the orchestra for ten years.

The Vienna Philharmonic proved ideal training, not least owing to the variety of its activities. ‘I was very happy to play in this wonderful orchestra, and especially to play opera. Opera is extremely helpful for teaching the secrets of ensemble playing. The conductor cannot always guide you when you’re accompanying singers, so the orchestra must be trained to listen properly. To learn all these aspects of tutti playing was enormously helpful, and I would advise young conductors to work and perform within an operatic setting as much as they can. I also had the opportunity to watch a number of great conductors and to learn from them – from their strengths, but also their weaknesses.’

Honeck conducts Beethoven’s Missa solemnis with the Bamberg Symphony and Munich Philharmonic Choir at the 2019 Internationale Wolfegger Konzerte festival in southern Germany

’I’m a big carlos kleiber fan. I played under his baton several times and studied his exceptional technique’

An important lesson was to make every rehearsal matter. ‘I didn’t like it when a conductor, even a famous one, would go through a Brahms symphony, for example (which of course the orchestra knows), and not say anything. I was annoyed because I wanted the conductor to make a contribution – and was so impressed by conductors who worked hard. I longed for them to reveal their secrets. Just to play through a piece was never my style, even more so now.’

Honeck cites many of the great conductors of the Vienna Philharmonic as influences – Karajan, Bernstein, Harnoncourt, Muti, but above all, Carlos Kleiber. ‘I’m a big Kleiber fan,’ he says. ‘I played under his baton several times and studied his exceptional technique.’ Honeck now sees himself as a representative of Kleiber’s legacy. When it comes to practical matters – baton technique and rehearsal discipline – he returns to Kleiber again and again. He is about to begin a new venture, giving masterclasses for young conductors, and the aim is to pass Kleiber’s techniques on to the next generation.

MAIN IMAGE HELMUT VOITH. CIRCLE IMAGE FELIX BROEDE

By the late 1980s Honeck was leading a busy double life, conducting as many concerts as possible while still holding his position with the Vienna Philharmonic. ‘The more offers I got, the more complicated it was. I didn’t want my viola colleagues to suffer because of my personal desire to be a conductor. I felt in my heart that the time would come when I had to leave the orchestra. So when Alexander Pereira, at that time the director of the Konzerthaus in Vienna, was appointed director of the Zurich Opera House, he asked if I would be willing to go to Zurich to take over as conductor. When he asked this, I knew now was the time. It was a really hard decision as I could still have been happy in that fantastic orchestra, but my heart was on fire with such a strong desire to conduct.’ After the Zurich Opera, Honeck went on to hold positions with Norwegian National Opera, the MDR Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig, the Oslo Philharmonic and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He continues to make guest appearances with orchestras around the world (in May 2020 he will conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in a programme including the Beethoven Violin Concerto played by Anne-Sophie Mutter), but since 2008 his major commitment has been to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

The Pittsburgh Symphony was ‘playing fantastically’ when Honeck arrived as its new music director but, he says, the musicians were also ‘longing for change’

ED DEARMITT / PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

’I am a string player, so vibrato is a very important topic for me – what kind of vibrato to use, how to express through it. Hardly any conductors talk about vibrato’

One of Honeck’s main aims in Pittsburgh has been to develop the orchestra’s unique sound, and he talks enthusiastically about its distinctive clarity of tone and the transparency and energy of its performances. But do the Viennese traditions upheld by Honeck conflict with these American values? ‘No, I think they hired me because of my heritage. I still remember when I did Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no.5 there for the first time, and it was love from the first moment. The orchestra was playing fantastically already under Mariss Jansons, but I believe the orchestra was longing for change. So I brought with me a lot of different traditions.’

The string sound that Honeck has cultivated in Pittsburgh draws on the orchestra’s performing history, as well as his own background as a violin and viola player. When it comes to vibrato, he clearly knows what he wants. ‘I am a string player, so vibrato is a very important topic for me – what kind of vibrato to use, and how to express through it. Hardly any conductors talk about vibrato. It is usually just play vibrato or play non vibrato. But you can have hand vibrato, finger vibrato – many different techniques. My work in rehearsal is mostly about getting a particular sound, and that means everybody using the same kind of vibrato.’

Musical expression guides Honeck’s every decision on matters of technique, but he avoids dogma. ‘There was a time when Mozart, for example, was played with vibrato on every note. Then came a period when it was political – I wouldn’t say correct – to perform it without any vibrato at all. Personally, I go with Leopold Mozart. He wrote that you can use ornaments and vibrato and other techniques, but always do it with taste. So use vibrato, but always to support expression. Play with vibrato, or without vibrato, if that is what the music requires. And if the expression calls for a very electric, intense sound, do it!’

Bowing techniques are another important ingredient of the Pittsburgh sound. ‘I work a lot with the position of the bow. When I do Mozart, for example, I often want an extremely light and airy sound from the strings, and so I ask them to play sul tasto. The speed of the bow is also important. Sometimes, for example, when you have a note at the end of a phrase that is written staccato, you can pick it out and make it marcato or you can play it in a light way. But it is all to do with the speed of the bow, and in rehearsal I often spend time making sure that all the players are bowing at the same speed.

‘The musicians are fantastic,’ continues Honeck, ‘and that makes it so much fun – when the orchestra knows how to play, and you can work on the expression. In my experience, players are grateful that I know how to play and can guide them.

Whether they agree or not on my interpretation is another question, but I always have the feeling that we create a unified sound picture. I work a lot with this, and the players have an excellent sensitivity to their ensemble playing. It is the reason why people increasingly recognise the Pittsburgh sound.’

The Pittsburgh SO has a long tradition of touring, and in the past couple of months the musicians have been in Europe, with eleven concerts in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Belgium, performing works including Shostakovich’s Symphony no.5 and Bruckner’s Symphony no.9 – both of which they have recently recorded, the Shostakovich winning two Grammys – as well as Mozart piano concertos with soloists Igor Levit and Lang Lang. The tour programme has included two works written to mark, respectively, Honeck’s 10th anniversary with the orchestra and his 60th birthday: Larghetto (2017) for orchestra by James MacMillan and Resurrexit (2018) by Mason Bates. The MacMillan, which was also played at Wolfegg last year, is an orchestral arrangement of his 2009 choral piece Miserere. ‘It has been very successful,’ enthuses Honeck. ‘People love it, and musicians ask me again and again to bring it back.’ The Bates also has a religious theme – ‘I am a religious person, so it is a bit of a homage to that. It is a very special piece and it has a very joyful ending, from death to resurrection.’

Such descriptions are typical of Honeck, whose musical discussions are peppered with narrative references. Another successful project in Pittsburgh has been a series of suites and fantasies based on operas, and Honeck has contributed to several new arrangements of music from Elektra, Rusalka and Jen?fa. ‘I am very pleased and surprised that we can still present music in new ways,’ he says. ‘This idea goes back to all of the great music I was playing at the Vienna State Opera. I was thinking that Elektra is such a great showpiece for the orchestra, but an orchestral version did not exist, so we made one.’

Is this a new way to tell stories with the orchestra? ‘It is wonderful that you mention that, because when I played under Kleiber, he considered every symphony to be like an opera: it was always narrative. He would give examples and say this is love, this is death, this is something foggy, and so on. He is right – every symphony and every piece is programmatic. Even a single note has a story. And in these fantasies and suites you can tell the story of the opera. But, of course, I have nothing against performing, say, a Brahms symphony.’

So does a Brahms symphony tell a story? ‘Oh yes, absolutely.’ When I say that Brahms would disagree, Honeck responds: ‘He was very discreet – we don’t really know so much about him. But what about the second movement of the Violin Concerto? It’s molto religioso. You can find lots of stories in the first movement of the Second Symphony, with its dance character and its fleeting melody, and also in the passacaglia of the Fourth Symphony, where each variation has its own character and tradition. Then there is that big organ-like flute solo, also in the finale – so much loneliness. All music has a story, though with Brahms it is a little more hidden than with other composers.’

Manfred Honeck (third left) in his former role as a violist with his Vienna Philharmonic colleagues

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Performing traditions are another important focus for Honeck, and a legacy of his time playing under Harnoncourt in Vienna. ‘I had the opportunity to talk with him many times. I was so impressed by how deeply he studied the music. It is not simply about knowing the score; you must also think about how musicians in the past might have played it and about the tradition of the music. He explained everything.’ So, when Honeck discusses Beethoven’s Third Symphony, his first interest is the ‘hunting’ Trio of the third movement. ‘How was hunting music played at the time?’ he asks. ‘You have to understand that there was a lot of emphasis on the first attack. So I stick very closely to this tradition. This goes for every composer that I conduct. I learnt all this from Harnoncourt. I don’t know how I would have known these things apart from playing under his baton. I do not know where I would be now if I hadn’t.’

As a pioneer of the period performance movement, Harnoncourt cut a polemical figure. So how about Honeck: is he a polemical conductor? ‘I would not say polemical; I would say provocative. I always take risks. I hate routine. Sometimes I have to be provocative, sometimes also shocking. I hope that my interpretation is both modern enough and traditional enough to allow me to convey the composer’s message and intentions to our times. After concerts I often get comments and letters from people who say they have heard in the music something completely new. For a conductor, that is the most beautiful thing – for people to hear the music as if it is for the first time. And then I know my mission has been fulfilled.’

’IT IS NOT SIMPLY ABOUT KNOWING THE SCORE; YOU MUST ALSO THINK ABOUT HOW MUSICIANS IN THE PAST MIGHT HAVE PLAYED IT, AND ABOUT THE TRADITION OF THE MUSIC’