[CD] SACD Manfred Honeck - Strauss: Tone Poems - Don Juan/ Death & Transfiguration/ Merry Pranks

Reference Recordings CREF 707 SA, 0030911270728 - Classical Hybrid Stereo SACD - First release In a new series with the Pittsburgh Symphony! Pittsburgh Live! A Stereophile 2014 Record To Die For A Gramophone 'Editor's Choice'! "The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra plays these three masterly symphonic poems with virtuosity, great feeling and a glorious patina of string tone, and the rich hall resonance is well caught by the SACD recording. But what make these performances so outstanding are Manfred Honeck's interpretations, which vividly bring out the music's emotional and pictorial detail...This is one of the outstanding Strauss CDs of the year." — Ivan March, Gramophone , March 2014, Editor's Choice Thrilling live performances from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Manfred Honeck, music director, in brilliant audiophile sound! This release is planned as the first in a series of multi-channel hybrid SACD recordings on Fresh! from Reference Recordings. Several additional recordings for the Pittsburgh Live! series are already completed and we expect to release two per year. The next title planned is Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, for spring 2014. "Manfred Honeck is one of the few conductors who may call themselves successors of the greatest, Karajan und Co. On this SACD, this outstanding musician conducts a Strauss program which one must count among the best having been published in the last years." — Pizzicato.lu (a music magazine from Luxemburg) "Honeck is already well known as an extremely fine Strauss conductor, but also one with very definite ideas on how these pieces should be interpreted...his admiration for these works is self-evident from the incandescent playing that he elicits from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra... The 5.1 channel recording was made and post-produced in 64fs DSD and the disc also includes HDCD encoding. This is without doubt an impressive start to what promises to be an exciting showcase for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra" — Graham Williams, SA-CD.net, Nov. 18, 2013