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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".

During the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s 2011 European Festivals Tour, William Caballero, and the Pittsburgh Symphony horn section he leads,received rave reviews. Michael Church of The Independent called Caballero “a principal horn whose pianissimo is simply miraculous,” and Guy Dammann wrote in The Guardian, “The horn section — led very much from the front by their excellent principal William Caballero – is one of the best in the business.” In its September 2012 review of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Exton recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, Gramophone magazine wrote, “Pittsburgh’s first horn is as spectacular as any on disc.”  

The 2021-2022 Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra season represents William Caballero’s 32nd as its principal horn under Maestros Manfred Honeck, Mariss Jansons and Lorin Maazel. Before joining the symphony in May 1989, Caballero previously held principal horn positions with the Houston Symphony, Houston Grand Opera and Hartford Symphony. He held third horn positions with the Montreal Symphony, Montreal Opera and acting third horn with the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops. He has performed as guest principal horn with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the St. Louis Symphony.   

Born in New Mexico and raised in Wisconsin, William Caballero’s early horn studies included working under Larry Simons, Barry Benjamin and Basil Tyler, as well as studying the piano and pipe organ. Caballero graduated from New England Conservatory in Boston where he studied with Richard Mackey and Thomas Newell, both former members of the Boston Symphony.  

Currently, William Caballero is the associate teaching professor of horn at Carnegie Mellon University School of Music. Previously he held teaching positions at Indiana University Bloomington, Rice University in Houston, Texas, and Duquesne University. He has been invited and presented master classes throughout the world including Northwestern University, Colburn School of Music, New England Conservatory, University of Indiana Bloomington, Cleveland Institute of Music, Curtis Institute of Music, Manhattan School of Music, New World Symphony, and the Beijing and Shanghai Conservatories. Summers have included teaching and performing at the Aspen Music Festival, the Chautauqua Music Festival, and the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan.  

In January 2012, William Caballero began collaboration with the Internet music teaching company ArtistWorks.com based in Napa, California. His teaching website was released in September 2012 as the only complete horn teaching curriculum available via the internet for horn students worldwide.   

William Caballero is also in demand as a chamber musician collaborating with musicians such as violinists Gil Shaham, Joseph Silverstein and Philip Setzer, and pianists André Previn, Christoph Eshenbach, Orli Shaham and Andre Watts. William has also performed and worked with jazz musician and composer Chris Brubeck, as well as ensembles that include the Tokyo String Quartet, Trio Johannas, Principal Strings of the Berlin Philharmonic, Center City Brass, Bay Chamber Concert Series, St. Barth’s Music Festival and the Grand Teton Music Festival. He is also a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Brass, which includes fellow colleagues of the Pittsburgh Symphony Brass section.   

Recent chamber music performances include performing Brahms’ Horn Trio in E-flat major with Gil and Orli Shaham in Zankel Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York and appearing several times live on National Public Radio’s (NPR) “Performance Today” in NPR’s Washington, D.C. studios.   

William Caballero solo’s regularly with the Pittsburgh Symphony with most recent collaboration as soloist under Maestro Honeck. In April 2014, Caballero performed the world premiere of Robert Levin Edition of Mozart’s 1st Horn Concerto in D, and in September 2012 performed the Pittsburgh Symphony premiere of Strauss Horn Concerto No. 1. Previous solo performances with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra have included Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat with Maestro Maazel, Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat with Maestro Andre Previn, Mozart Concerto fragments with Pittsburgh Symphony Concertmaster Andres Cardenes, Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with Maestro Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and tenor Anthony Griffey, Schumann’s Konzertstück in F for four horns and orchestra with his Pittsburgh Symphony horn colleagues under the baton of Maestro Sir John Elliot Gardener, and the John Williams Horn Concerto under the baton of Maestro Leonard Slatkin.  

Other recent solo appearances outside of the Pittsburgh Symphony  have included performances in Montenegro with Maestro Ronald Zollman and with the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic at New York City’s Carnegie Hall under the baton of former Principal Horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dale Clevenger.  

In May 1992, William Caballero premiered Benjamin Lees’ Concerto for Horn and Orchestra with the Pittsburgh Symphony under the baton of then-Music Director Lorin Maazel. Following the performances in Pittsburgh, he performed Lees’ Concerto in Spain, Germany, and England with the Pittsburgh Symphony on tour. In May 1996, Caballero recorded the concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Lorin Maazel for New World Records.  

Caballero holds the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Anonymous Foundation Principal Horn Chair.

Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).

Jessie was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s during a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Artists gravitated to the hotbed of artistic experimentation and community development. Her parents – her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller – were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances, and parties where neighbors, activists, and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time. It is from this unique experience that Jessie has created a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy.

Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, Caught by the Wind (2016) for the Albany Symphony and the American Music Festival, and Banner (2014) – written to mark the 200th anniversary of The Star Spangled Banner – for The Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation.

Since 1999, Jessie has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African-American and Latinx string players and has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble. She was a two-time laureate of the annual Sphinx Competition and was awarded their highest honor, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. She has received additional grants and awards from the ASCAP Foundation, Chamber Music America, American Composers Orchestra, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sorel Organization.

The New York Philharmonic has selected Jessie as one of the featured composers for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights in the United States to women. Other forthcoming works include a nonet inspired by the Great Migration, told from the perspective of Montgomery’s great-grandfather William McCauley and to be performed by Imani Winds and the Catalyst Quartet; a cello concerto for Thomas Mesa jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, and The Sphinx Organization; and a new orchestral work for the National Symphony Orchestra; a viola concerto, L.E.S Characters, for Masumi per Rostad commissioned by the Grant

Park Music Festival, City Music Cleveland, Interlochen Center for the Arts, the Orlando Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; a new arrangement of a song cycle, Five Freedom Songs, written for Soprano Julia Bullock, and a site-specific collaboration with Bard SummerScape Festival and Pam Tanowitz Dance, I was waiting for the echo of a better day, with Choreography by Pam Tanowitz and music by Jessie Montgomery and Big Dog Little Dog.

Jessie began her violin studies, at the Third Street Music School Settlement, one of the oldest community organizations in the country. A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, she continues to maintain an active performance career as a violinist appearing regularly with her own ensembles, as well as with the Silkroad Ensemble and Sphinx Virtuosi.

Jessie’s teachers and mentors include Sally Thomas, Ann Setzer, Alice Kanack, Joan Tower, Derek Bermel, Mark Suozzo, Ira Newborn, and Laura Kaminsky. She holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is Professor of violin and composition at The New School. In May 2021, she will begin her appointment as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

There probably isn’t an orchestra in the world that hasn’t played a work by GRAMMY Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty. Known for his ear, his wit and his imagination of how instruments work together, his music is inspired by American idioms, mythologies and icons.

Born in 1954 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Daugherty is the son of a dance band drummer and the oldest of five brothers, all professional musicians. As a young man, Daugherty studied composition with many of the preeminent composers of the twentieth century including Jacob Druckman, Earle Brown, Bernard Rands and Roger Reynolds at Yale University (1980-82), Betsy Jolas at the Paris Conservatory and Pierre Boulez at IRCAM in Paris (1979-80), and György Ligeti in Hamburg (1982-84). From 1980-82, Daugherty was also an assistant to jazz arranger Gil Evans in New York.

His music has received six GRAMMY Awards, including “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” in 2010 for Deus ex Machina for piano and orchestra and in 2016 for Tales of Hemingway for cello and orchestra. In addition to being a frequent guest of professional orchestras, festivals and universities around the globe, Daugherty is also Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance in Ann Arbor, where he is a mentor to many of today’s most talented young composers.

Cynthia Koledo DeAlmeida was appointed by Lorin Maazel as principal oboe of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1991. For two years prior, she was associate principal oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti.

DeAlmeida received the Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Michigan, studying with Arno Mariotti, and the Master of Music degree from Temple University, as a student of Richard Woodhams. She is also grateful to her other teachers — Sarah Young, Robert Sorton, Elaine Douvas, John Mack, H. Robert Reynolds and Max Rudolf. DeAlmeida proudly plays on F. Loree oboes of Paris, France.

In November 2002, DeAlmeida’s first solo CD was released on the Boston Records label. Classic Discoveries for Oboe was hailed by American Record Guide as “a masterly recording… Cynthia Koledo DeAlmeida is simply one of the finest exponents of the instrument anywhere.” Her second solo CD, entitled Mist Over the Lakeon the Crystal Record label, was released in 2006 to rave reviews: “Ms. DeAlmeida is hands down one of the best players in the world…” In 2015, her third CD Silver and Gold was released on the Crystal Records label. Gramophone magazine called her “a poetic artist” and Fanfare magazine wrote “she is a soloist of immense technique and considerable charm…”  DeAlmeida can also be heard on Crystal Records’ recording of Sir Andre Previn’s Sonata for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano with Sir Andre Previn, as well as all the Pittsburgh Symphony recordings since 1991 under Lorin Maazel, Mariss Jansons, Marek Janowski and Manfred Honeck. In 2009, DeAlmeida travelled to Berlin to perform and record the German Requiem of Brahms with Marek Janowski and the Radio Orchestra of Berlin (RSB) on the Pentatone label.

DeAlmeida has been featured with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in concertos by J.S.Bach, Leonardo Balada, Alan Fletcher, Francaix, Haydn, Mozart, Lucas Richman, Richard Strauss and Vaughan Williams. She performed these concertos with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andres Cardenes, Sir Andrew Davis, Gunther Herbig, Manfred Honeck, Lorin Maazel, Sir Andre Previn, Lucas Richman, Alessandro Siciliani, Leonard Slatkin, Jeanette Sorrell, Yoav Talmi and Pinchas Zukerman. The concertos by Balada, Richman and Fletcher were all commissioned for DeAlmeida by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, in 1992, 2006 and 2015 respectively. The Balada was recorded for New World Records with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Lorin Maazel conducting. The Richman concerto was recorded for Albany Records with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Lucas Richman conducting. Four different times, DeAlmeida has performed Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe with the Pittsburgh Symphony, partnering with violinists Vladimir Spivakov, Andres Cardenes, Pinchas Zukerman and Noah Bendix-Balgley. DeAlmeida also has appeared as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Haddonfield Symphony, the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, the Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, the Knoxville Symphony, the U.S. Army Orchestra and the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic. 

DeAlmeida is an avid chamber musician, having performed 10 recitals at Carnegie Mellon University since 1993. For one of these recitals, she commissioned, published and recorded a piece for Oboe, Horn, Cello, and Piano by Michael Moricz, entitled “Three Consequences for Four Players.” Each summer since 2002, she performs and teaches as a faculty member of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. Several of her performances there have been featured on NPR’s Performance Today. DeAlmeida has also performed at the Strings Festival in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; the La Jolla Festival in La Jolla, California; and the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont as well as several “Music from Marlboro” tours.

Teaching has always been a rewarding part of DeAlmeida’s artistic life. She has been associate teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Music since 2012, and a faculty member there since 1991. She has held teaching positions at Temple University in Philadelphia and Trenton State College in New Jersey, and has taught at the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland as well as the New World Symphony. She has given masterclasses at universities in the United States and abroad including the Manhattan School of Music, the University of Tennessee, Eastern Michigan University, the University of South Carolina and the Seoul Conservatory. 

In 2003, DeAlmeida was featured on national television on the CBS Early Show in a story relating to the oboe and its remarkable health benefits for asthma sufferers, which led to her work as an ambassador for the American Respiratory Alliance in Pittsburgh.

DeAlmeida volunteers at Pittsburgh’s classical radio station WQED in their fundraising pledge drives. She participates in the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Education and Community Engagement department playing and speaking to young people in various venues throughout the Pittsburgh area. Each summer, DeAlmeida enjoys volunteering at the Woodlands Foundation’s Notes from the Heart music camp in Wexford, Pennsylvania.