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Manfred Honeck has firmly established himself as one of the world’s leading conductors, whose distinctive and revelatory interpretations receive great international acclaim. As Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where his contract runs through the 2027-2028 season, he has entered his 17th season. Celebrated at home and abroad, he and the orchestra continue to serve as cultural ambassadors for the city of Pittsburgh. Guest appearances include Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, as well as the major venues of Europe and leading festivals such as the BBC Proms, Salzburg Festival, Musikfest Berlin, Lucerne Festival, Rheingau Music Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, and Grafenegg Festival. In summer 2024, he leads the Pittsburgh Symphony in a nine-city European Festivals Tour, starting with their appearance as the only American orchestra at the prestigious Salzburg Festival and concluding at Vienna Konzerthaus.

Manfred Honeck's successful work in Pittsburgh is being extensively documented by recordings on the Reference Recordings label, featuring works by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Shostakovich, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and others. They have received a multitude of outstanding reviews and awards, including many GRAMMY® nominations, and he and the orchestra won the GRAMMY® for "Best Orchestral Performance" in 2018. The most recent recording, Bruckner's Symphony No. 7, paired with Resurrexit by Mason Bates, was released in July 2024 to great critical acclaim.

Born in Austria, Manfred Honeck completed his musical training at the University of Music in Vienna. His many years of experience 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, and his art of interpretation is based on his determination to venture deep beneath the surface of the music. He began his conducting career as 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, as Music Director of the Norwegian National Opera, Principal Guest Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and Chief Conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stockholm. In November 2023, he was appointed Honorary Conductor by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, following decades of close collaboration.

Manfred Honeck also has a strong profile as opera conductor. In his four seasons as General Music Director of the Staatsoper Stuttgart, he conducted premieres of operas by Berlioz, Mozart, Poulenc, Strauss, Verdi, and Wagner. He has also appeared as guest at leading houses such as Semperoper Dresden, Komische Oper Berlin, Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Royal Opera of Copenhagen, and the Salzburg Festival. In 2020, Beethoven’s anniversary year, he conducted a new staging of Fidelio (1806 version) at the Theater an der Wien. In autumn 2022, he made his much-acclaimed debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, leading a revival of Mozart’s Idomeneo. Beyond the podium, Manfred Honeck has designed a series of symphonic suites, including Janáček’s Jenůfa, Strauss’s Elektra, Dvořák’s Rusalka as well as Puccini's Turandot which he regularly performs around the globe. The most recent arrangement, of Strauss’s Salome, was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2023.

As a guest conductor, Manfred Honeck has worked with all leading international orchestras, including Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Staatskapelle Dresden, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Accademia di Santa Cecilia Rome and the Vienna Philharmonic. In the United States, he has conducted all major US orchestras, including New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony. He has also been Artistic Director of the International Concerts Wolfegg in Germany for thirty years.

In 2024-2025, Manfred Honeck will conduct fourteen wide-ranging programs and several special projects in Pittsburgh, including all four of the season's world premieres and commissions. He also will return to the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Concertgebouworkest Amsterdam, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, amongst others. In Bruckner's anniversary year of 2024, he will continue to place a special focus on the music of this composer.

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, the jury of the International Classical Music Awards declared him "Artist of the Year".

Prizewinner at the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition and SONY Classical exclusive artist, Pablo Ferrández is hailed as a “new cello genius” (Le Figaro). A captivating performer, “Ferrández has the lot: technique, mettle, spirit, authority as a soloist, expressivity and charm” (El Pais).

In March 2021 he released his debut album under SONY Classical, “Reflections”, which was highly acclaimed by the critics and praised with the Opus Klassik Award 2021. In Fall 2022 Ferrández will be releasing his second album, which comprises Brahms Double Concerto, performed with Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Czech Philharmonic under Manfred Honeck, as well as Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio, performed with Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis.

Recent highlights included appearances with LA Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic, Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Bayersichen Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Israel Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Barcelona Symphony and the Artist-in-residence positions at the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, Tenerife Symphony and Orquesta de Valencia.

The 22/23 season will bring the return to the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic, his debut at the Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Radio Symphony, the tour with Anne-Sophie Mutter and the London Philharmonic through Europe, a Spanish tour with the Antwerp Symphony under Elim Chan, the returns with Santa Cecilia Orchestra under D. Gatti, Konzerthaus Orchester under A. Poga, Baltimore Symphony under K. Ryan, as well as debuts with Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala under R.Chailly, Oslo Philharmonic under V.Petrenko, Tonkuenstler Orchestra under R. Trevino, Indianapolis Symphony under L. Gonzalez-Granados and NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester under E.Yashima.

Ferrández will appear in recital at the Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Koln Philharmonie, Berlin Philharmonie, Palau de la Música Catalana, Sociedad Filarmónica de Bilbao, at the Schloss-Elmau and Sion Festivals, and will also be Artist-in-residence of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

As a recitalist and chamber musician, Pablo frequently collaborates with such artists as Anne-Sophie Mutter, Janine Jansen, Vadim Repin, Martha Argerich, Denis Kozhukhin, Gidon Kremer, Yuja Wang, Nikolay Lugansky, Beatrice Rana, Maxim Rysanov, Alice Sara Ott, Elena Bashkirova, Luis del Valle and Sara Ferrández.

Born in Madrid in 1991, in a family of musicians, Pablo Ferrández joined the prestigious Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía when he was 13 to study with Natalia Shakhovskaya. After that he completed his studies at the Kronberg Academy with Frans Helmerson and became scholar of the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation.

Mr. Ferrández plays the Stradivarius “Lord Aylesford” (1696) thanks to the Nippon Music Foundation and the Stradivarius “Archinto” 1689, on a generous life-long loan from a member of the Stretton Society.

Called “spellbinding” (Seen and Heard International) with “glow and poise and electric tension” (The Daily Telegraph), the music of composer Katherine Balch captures the magic of everyday sounds, inviting audiences into a sonic world characterized by imagination, discovery, and textural lyricism.  Inspired by the intimacy of quotidian objects, found sounds, and natural processes, she has been described as “some kind of musical Thomas Edison – you can just hear her tinkering around in her workshop, putting together new sounds and textural ideas” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Katherine’s work has been commissioned and performed by leading ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta, l’Orchestra Philharmonique de Radio France, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the symphony orchestras of Dallas, Minnesota, Oregon, Albany, Indianapolis, and Tokyo. She has been featured on IRCAM’s ManiFeste, Fontainebleau Music Festival, and Festival MANCA in France, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK, Suntory Summer Arts and Takefu Music Festival in Japan, and the Aspen, Norfolk, Santa Fe, and Tanglewood music festivals in the United States. Her work has been presented in major global venues including Carnegie Hall, Disney Hall, and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall.

Winner of the 2020-2021 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Katherine was nominated by violinist Hilary Hahn for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 2020 Career Advancement Award. She has also been honored by ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chamber Music America, the Barlow Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the International Society of Contemporary Music, the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and Wigmore Hall. Her music is published exclusively worldwide by Schott Music.

Katherine was the 2017-2020 composer-in-residence for the California Symphony, where she was lauded by the Mercury News as a “superbly gifted composer [with] a compositional voice that is truly unique and full of wonder.” She has also served as composer-in-residence for Young Concert Artists, Inc.

Deeply committed to pursuing inclusive, engaging pedagogical practices that empower students through creative music-making, Katherine is currently  Assistant Professor of Composition at Yale School of Music. She has previously served on the faculties of Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute, Mannes School of Music, Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, the Walden School and Bard College-Conservatory Prep. Katherine holds a D.M.A. from Columbia University and an M.M. from Yale School of Music. She counts among her mentors George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas, Marcos Balter, Zosha Di Castri, Aaron Kernis, Chris Theofanidis, and David Lang. 

Katherine documents her lived experiences on the page, with each composition serving as a diary of what has captivated her curiosity. When not making or listening to music, she can be found hiking, cooking, or hanging out with her feline sidekick, Zarathustra and her husband, fellow composer Ted Moore.