By David Allen
PITTSBURGH — “What is the reason to bring out a Beethoven Five, or Seven, or Three?” the conductor Manfred Honeck asked, turning to the question of recordings of canonical symphonies. “Another CD in the world. My God, who cares?”
With hundreds of “Eroicas” available at the push of a thumb, who, indeed? What could there possibly be left to say?
Quite a lot, as it turns out, and Mr. Honeck is saying it with the Pittsburgh Symphony, long one of the finest American ensembles but just a few years past a bruising musicians’ strike. When the orchestra and Mr. Honeck, its music director since 2008, arrive in New York to perform Beethoven and Mahler at David Geffen Hall on May 19, five years since they last appeared in the city, they will arrive having built their reputation by recording the standard repertoire, formidably well.
“If I do it,” Mr. Honeck said in a recent interview in his office in Heinz Hall, the ornate former movie palace in Pittsburgh that houses the symphony, “I want to do it as good as I can do it.”
Good barely covers it. All eight of the releases that the Pittsburgh forces have brought out on Reference Recordings, with the aid of microphone whizzes from Soundmirror, come with the highest of recommendations. (Earlier recordings, primarily of Mahler, are now hard to find on a Japanese imprint, Exton.) Four have received nominations for the Grammy for best orchestral performance. One, of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Barber’s Adagio for Strings, won in 2018.
There’s a properly idiomatic account of Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony that comes with a clever suite from Janacek’s “Jenufa,” one of several operatic compilations that Mr. Honeck has conceived and had executed by the composer Tomas Ille. Another, from Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” appears with a desolate Tchaikovsky Sixth. There’s a radiant, faithful take on Bruckner’s Fourth, which bodes well for that composer’s Ninth, due for release this fall. There are two sensationally powerful discs of Strauss, one of tone poems, the other of suites from “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Elektra.”
And yes, there’s a Beethoven Five, a Beethoven Seven and a Beethoven Three, easily the most enthralling and involving recordings of these most major of major symphonies I have heard in years. The 2015 coupling of the Fifth and Seventh seethes with ideas, transcending tedious debates about period practice to sound utterly fresh and free. The 2018 release of the “Eroica” is better still, showing off the orchestra’s spectacular playing, which marries deft refinement to forceful physicality.
Why are these recordings so breathtakingly good? Plenty of orchestras record, after all, and most record in the same way they do in Pittsburgh. They tape several concerts of the same program live, usually three or four. There’s a patching session to fix errors and correct details. Then there’s editing.
And in this conductor’s case, there’s more editing. Minute editing. Relentless editing.
“Even one note, it can annoy you for weeks,” Mr. Honeck said, laughing. “You ask our sound guys. They suffer.”
His fastidious preparation is reflected in the practical, how-to booklet notes that he writes for the recordings, thousands of words long and full of endless detail about the choices he has made. He writes his own bowings. He tinkers with the instrumentation. He reads deeply, and dreams up metaphors to sharpen the imagery.
It’s a technique that Mr. Honeck, born in Austria in 1958, learned from the very best. As a violist in the Vienna Philharmonic from 1986 to 1992, he played under a who’s-who of conductors, including Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan. He talked about historical performance with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and assisted Claudio Abbado. But one man stood out.
“The temptation,” Mr. Honeck said, “is for conductors to say, ‘Oh, it’s too soft, too loud, too quick, too slow.’ That’s four terms, and within two and half hours you hear these all the time. You can imagine, it’s boring. But Carlos Kleiber, he asked with every phrase we do, why do we do it? What is the context of the music? He brought pictures, images of that.”
The horn player Stephen Kostyniak, who serves as chairman of the Pittsburgh musicians’ committee, recalled an early appearance, in the period between Mr. Honeck turning down the Czech Philharmonic in favor of the Pittsburgh Symphony in January 2007 and when he formally took up the post in September 2008.
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Why are Mr. Honeck’s recordings with the Pittsburgh Symphony so breathtakingly good? Editing. Minute editing. Relentless editing.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Why are Mr. Honeck’s recordings with the Pittsburgh Symphony so breathtakingly good? Editing. Minute editing. Relentless editing.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
“We did ‘Ein Heldenleben’,” Mr. Kostyniak said. “He wanted one particular quintuplet rhythm a certain way, because in his mind it’s when Strauss’s wife slaps him and says, ‘Shut up!’”
Mr. Honeck, added Mr. Kostyniak, was “not one of the tyrants of old, but he’s very particular in what he wants, and he doesn’t mind taking the time out of rehearsal to really make sure that it’s there.”
Kleiber’s example does not stop with evocative imagery. Playing under that enigmatic, combustible genius taught Mr. Honeck that conducting is a bodily pursuit, a physical recreation of the sound you want. He painstakingly rehearses the shape and speed of the hand movements he will use to trace a phrase, and the body positions he will need to take up to win the right kind of emphasis. Although Mr. Honeck is by no means copying his precursor, a certain similarity of gesture is obvious to anyone who has spent too much time watching old Kleibervideos on YouTube.
“A violinist has the Oistrakh technique, or the Auer technique,” Mr. Honeck said. “We forget that conductors also have a technique. It’s not just 1-2-3-4. That’s like a fingering.”
“I found out that this technique brings you to much more refined music-making,” he added.