Remy Franck reviews Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony’s recording of Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in Pizzicato Magazine:
“Manfred Honeck is a conductor who thinks a lot about music… This always results in personal interpretations like this one. …There is plenty of excitement in his very detailed and pulsating interpretation, with emphatically bright colors and many a tumble in the woodwinds, in addition to some more austere-sounding passages (including the somewhat eerie funeral march at measure 513). The Scherzo is dynamic and dancing, finely differentiated, throughout humorous, sometimes mischievous. This second movement is followed by a rhetorically superbly shaped Adagio, which becomes very exciting in this well-thought interpretation.”
—Remy Franck