PittsburgH SympHony orchestrA
Manfred Honeck, Music director
Semantix has advised the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, one of America’s great orchestras, and its Music Director Manfred Honeck in a number of areas including PR/Communications and long-term strategy.
“From the glittering burst of strings at the start of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto to the sleek heat of the finale of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, this was immaculate yet impassioned playing…The performance was aristocratic, in the best sense.”
Reference Recordings proudly presents this iconic work in a new and definitive interpretation from Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, in superb audiophile sound. This hybrid SACD release was recorded in beautiful and historic Heinz Hall, home of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Music: Excerpt from Symphony No. 9 in D minor, (1896; unfinished) ed. Nowak: II Scherzo: Bewegt, lebhaft – Trio: Schnell
Composer: Anton Bruckner
Artists: Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck, Conductor
Album: Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 (FR-733SACD)
Label: FRESH! From Reference Recordings
In his deeply personal and scholarly music notes, Maestro Honeck gives us great insight into the history and the musical structure of Bruckner’s final composition, and describes how he conducts and interprets this masterwork. To conclude his notes he quotes Bruckner biographer Max Auer: “The Ninth Symphony surpasses all its predecessors in sublimity and consecration. If Arthur Schopenhauer describes the arts as an image of an idea, but music as an idea in itself, then Bruckner’s swan song, his Ninth Symphony, appears to us as the idea of the beyond, of the deity itself. Already from the very beginning of the richly structured first movement, one feels surrounded by the twilight light of a Gothic cathedral—a mood that releases us from the heaviness and fatigue of matter and leads us to the afterlife.”
This release is the ninth in the highly acclaimed Pittsburgh Live! series of multi-channel hybrid SACD releases on the FRESH! series from Reference Recordings. This series has received GRAMMY® Nominations in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. Its recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.5 /Barber Adagio for Strings won the 2018 GRAMMY® Awards for Best Orchestral Performance and Best Engineered Classical Album.