new appointments

Dallas Symphony Appoints Zweden

Jaap van Zweden, a 46 year old Dutch conductor (who was the youngest concertmaster in the history of the famed Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam) has been named as the next music director for the Dallas Symphony. Read the details here. It was widely rumored that OSO music director Carlos Kalmar was in the running for this position, so it’s good news for Portland audiences that someone else was awarded the position.

Pittsburgh Appoints Honeck

From PlaybillArts.com:

After a three-year experiment with a trio of part-time “artistic advisers” and guest conductors, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has selected a music director. Manfred Honeck, a 48-year-old Austrian conductor with a fast-rising reputation in Europe and stacks of glowing reviews from both sides of the Atlantic, begins a three-year term with the PSO in September 2008.

Honeck and the orchestra’s board announced the appointment at a press conference this morning. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, other than that he will conduct eight weeks in Pittsburgh his first season and 10 weeks in subsequent seasons, with additional weeks for touring. Also, according to The New York Times, Honeck will definitely take on the fundraising, administrative and public relations duties which are part of a music director’s job in the U.S. but which make some European maestros uncomfortable.

Honeck conducted the PSO for the first time only last season. But the chemistry between maestro and musicians was evidently extraordinary from the start. “It is no exaggeration to say that the orchestra and I got on like a house on fire,” Honeck said in a statement; PSO board chairman Dick Simmons told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “In the 16 years I have been associated with this orchestra, I have never heard the overwhelming endorsement of a conductor by the musicians [like the one they gave to Honeck], and that includes some pretty high-level conductors.”