“The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is in the midst of a 10-city European tour with stops at some of the best concert halls in the world, but on Sunday the musicians and music director Manfred Honeck paused to pay tribute to the one-year anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead,” writes Jeremy Reynolds in Monday’s (10/28) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “At an event sponsored by the American Academy in Berlin, a string quartet of PSO musicians that spotlights works by oppressed composers, the Clarion Quartet, performed music by Weinberg, Shostakovich and more. Then Mr. Honeck sat with moderator Harry Liebersohn, a graduate of the Academy, and Pittsburgh-based writer Adam Ehrlich Sachs to discuss the shooting and how arts groups could respond to such events…. The conversation was broadcast via Facebook Live and is still available to view on the orchestra’s Facebook page. One month after the massacre, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra brought together community leaders for a memorial concert titled ‘A Concert for Peace and Unity’… broadcast nationally on PBS,” which Honeck described as “one of the most emotional concerts I’ve conducted in my life.”
Posted October 29, 2019
In photo: The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Music Director Manfred Honeck, and pianist Lang Lang performed at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany at a concert the night before the one-year anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, which the orchestra marked while on tour.
