Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

Manfred Honeck is widely regarded as one of the world's leading conductors, celebrated for his distinctive and revelatory interpretations that have garnered international acclaim. As Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where he is now in his 19th season, he continues to shape the orchestra’s artistic identity with a deep sense of purpose and passion. His tenure, recently extended through the 2032–2033 season, has seen the orchestra flourish artistically while strengthening its role as a cultural ambassador for the city of Pittsburgh. Celebrated at home and abroad, the orchestra has appeared at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, as well as at major venues throughout Europe and prestigious festivals such as the BBC Proms, Salzburg Festival, Musikfest Berlin, Lucerne Festival, Rheingau Music Festival, and Grafenegg Festival.

Manfred Honeck's acclaimed Pittsburgh tenure is reflected in an extensive discography on the Reference Recordings label, featuring works by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Shostakovich, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and others. These recordings have received widespread critical acclaim and multiple GRAMMY® nominations, including a win for "Best Orchestral Performance" in 2018. In August 2025, he and the orchestra released Requiem: Mozart’s Death in Words and Music, an original concept reimagining a funeral mass for Mozart, combining the composer’s Requiem with Gregorian chant, poetry, and other choral works by Mozart. 

Born in Austria, Manfred Honeck completed his musical training at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. His years as a violist with the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera Orchestra have had a lasting influence on his work as a conductor, and his approach to interpretation is rooted in a desire to venture deep beneath the surface of the music. He began his conducting career as an 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 2023, he was appointed Honorary Conductor by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, following decades of close collaboration.  

Manfred Honeck also enjoys a distinguished profile as an 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 a guest conductor at major institutions such as Semperoper Dresden, Komische Oper Berlin, the 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 created 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, based on Strauss's Arabella, received its premiere with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2025.

As a guest conductor, Manfred Honeck appears regularly with many of the world's leading orchestras, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra London, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. In the United States, he has conducted many of the nation’s most distinguished ensembles. He has also been Artistic Director of the International Wolfegg Concerts in Germany for over three decades. 

In summer 2026, he returns to the Salzburg Festival to conduct Ariadne auf Naxos with the Vienna Philharmonic. He will also lead the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on a European festival tour, with appearances in Salzburg, Lucerne, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and at the opening concert of the season at the Vienna Konzerthaus. In the 2026/27 season, he will commemorate the 200th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s death with special programs and a new commission from Jüri Reinvere, to be presented worldwide.

Manfred Honeck holds honorary doctorates from several universities in the United States and has been 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." In 2026, he received the Julio Kilenyi Medal from the American Bruckner Society, an honor bestowed on distinguished interpreters of Bruckner.

Violinist Alexi Kenney is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart. He is equally at home creating experimental programs, commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras around the world, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of our time. Alexi is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. 

Alexi begins the 2025/26 season with his return to the Pittsburgh Symphony, performing the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Manfred Honeck. He also returns to the San Francisco Symphony as soloist and leader, as well as to the Dallas Symphony playing Barber's Violin Concerto with Daniele Rustioni. Alexi debuts with the Houston Symphony and Slovak Philharmonic performing Sofia Gubaidulina's Violin Concerto “in tempus praesens” with Juraj Valcuha, as well as with Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the Santa Barbara Symphony, Wichita Symphony, and Erie Philharmonic. Honoring his experimental nature, Alexi curates a multimedia program at San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox in February 2026. Recital and chamber appearances include the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society in a special program celebrating queer composers on National Coming Out Day, the Phillips Collection, 92nd Street Y, and Spoleto Festival. Highlights of recent seasons include concertos with the Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Detroit Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Indianapolis Symphony, Gulbenkian Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, and l’Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. Alexi has been featured in a play/lead role with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and New Century Chamber Orchestra, and has played recitals at Wigmore Hall, on Carnegie Hall’s ‘Distinctive Debuts’ series, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Frick Collection, Mecklenberg-Vorpommern Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 

Alexi continues to perform and develop Shifting Ground, a multimedia program in collaboration with the video artist Xuan, which weaves together pieces for violin and electronics by J.S. Bach, Rafiq Bhatia, Matthew Burtner, Mario Davidovsky, Salina Fisher, Nicola Matteis, Angélica Negrón, and Paul Wiancko. Alexi has performed Shifting Ground at the Celebrity Series of Boston, Ojai Festival, and Baryshnikov Arts Center, among others. He also explores his love for period instruments and playing, recently performing the complete Schumann Violin Sonatas on gut strings with Amy Yang on fortepiano. 

Chamber music continues to be a major part of Alexi’s life, regularly performing at festivals including Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, Kronberg, La Jolla, Ojai, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Ravinia, Seattle, and Spoleto. He is a founding member of Owls—an inverted quartet hailed as a “dream group” by The New York Times—alongside violist Ayane Kozasa, cellist Gabe Cabezas, and cellist-composer Paul Wiancko. Alexi is also an alum of the Bowers Program (formerly CMS 2) at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. 

Born in Palo Alto, California in 1994, Alexi is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied with Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried. Previous mentors in the Bay Area include Wei He, Jenny Rudin, and Natasha Fong. Winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild Competition and laureate of the 2012 Menuhin Competition, Alexi has been profiled by Musical America, Strings Magazine, and The New York Times, and has written for The Strad. He plays a violin made in London by Stefan-Peter Greiner in 2009 and a bow made in Port Townsend, Washington by Charles Espey in 2024. 

Outside of music, Alexi enjoys hojicha, modernist design and architecture, baking for friends (especially this lumberjack cake), and walking for miles on end in whichever city he finds himself, listening to podcasts and Bach on repeat. 

CHRISTOPHER THEOFANIDIS (b. 12/18/67 in Dallas, Texas) has had performances by many leading orchestras from around the world, including the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the Moscow Soloists, the National, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit Symphonies, among many others. He has also served as Composer of the Year for the Pittsburgh Symphony during their 2006-7 season, for which he wrote a violin concerto for Sarah Chang.

Mr. Theofanidis holds degrees from Yale, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Houston, and has been the recipient of the International Masterprize, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship to France to study with Tristan Mural at IRCAM, a Tanglewood fellowship, and two fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007 he was nominated for a Grammy award for best composition for his chorus and orchestra work, The Here and Now, based on the poetry of Rumi, and in 2017 for his bassoon concerto. His orchestral work, Rainbow Body, has been one of the most performed new orchestral works of the new millennium, having been performed by over 150 orchestras internationally.

Mr. Theofanidis’ has written a ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, a work for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra as part of their ‘New Brandenburg’ series, and two operas for the San Francisco and Houston Grand Opera companies. Thomas Hampson sang the lead role in the San Francisco opera. His work for Houston, The Refuge, featurs six sets of international non-Western musicians alongside the opera musicians. He has a long-standing relationship with the Atlanta Symphony and Maestro Robert Spano, and has just four recordings with them, including his concert length oratorio, Creation/Creator, which was featured at the SHIFT festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. this year with the ASO, chorus, and soloists. His work, Dreamtime Ancestors, for the orchestral consortium, New Music for America, has been played by over fifty orchestras over the past two seasons. He has served as a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s Leadership Program, and he is a former faculty member of the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University as well as the Juilliard School. Mr. Theofanidis is currently a professor at Yale University, and composer-in-residence and co-director of the composition program at the Aspen Music Festival.