Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra / Soltani / Honeck

Anyone who grows up with eight siblings learns early on not to take things too seriously. For Manfred Honeck, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra for the last ten years and now 60 years old, the ability to »step back« is still an essential component of collaborative music making. A native of Vorarlberg who regularly conducts the most important ensembles of the world, from the Vienna and the Berlin Philharmonics to the New York Philharmonic, he enjoys working with youth orchestras. It goes without saying that young musicians receive him particularly well thanks to his unpretentious, always benevolent and yet persevering way of fine-tuning a project as a whole. Also benefiting from that is Honeck’s compatriot Kian Soltani, who Sol Gabetta invited to Kiel Castle in 2014 for her SHMF cello night, and who in 2017 received the SHMF Leonard Bernstein Award.