Once a violinist with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck is now serving his 16th season as music director of the top-notch Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra—an ensemble seldom if ever named as one of America’s Big Five, a number as shockingly inadequate as that of the seats on America’s Supreme Court. Inaugurating the new season of the Wiener Konzerthaus (an institution scarcely a whisker less prestigious than the Konzertverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic), Honeck presents the Pittsburgh’s credentials with the surefire John Adams hit Short Ride in a Fast Machine and closes with Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major (“The Titan”), which is Viennese to the core. Agelessly glamorous at 61, Anne-Sophie Mutter headlines the seraphic centerpiece, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concert in E minor, op. 64, a score she made her own in her wunderkind teens under the aegis of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. (Their recording remains a touchstone.) —Matthew Gurewitsch