Calling Manfred Honeck a Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra guest conductor this weekend is a bit like calling Giuseppe Verdi a string quartet composer. Both are technically true -- Verdi did write a nice quartet in between those stunning operas -- but they hardly tell the whole story.

Yet it is with that title of guest that Honeck, PSO music director designate, comes to Heinz Hall for a program of Richard Strauss, Alan Fletcher and, yes, Verdi. With the gala treatment marking the start of Honeck's tenure still months away, the Austrian conductor finds himself in a curious situation.

"I am dealing the whole time now with [PSO] issues," he says. "It will be a strange feeling for me to come in May to feel like I am already director, but I am not until September."

Since the orchestra doesn't have an outgoing music director -- the closest the PSO would have had, artistic adviser Andrew Davis, left his post last year -- Honeck would not be stepping on any toes. And he has already been heavily involved in the orchestra's future artistic planning. But it is not his style to push aside the proper process.

"Of course, people will know that I will take over the music director job, but I am still a guest conductor," he asserts.

Those interested in the qualities the 49-year-old conductor will bring to the post, this sort of diplomacy is high among them. Honeck comports himself like an ambassador, mixing an easygoing personality with conviction about classical music. His demeanor already has made a huge impression on PSO musicians, who have especially praised his manner of requesting changes in rehearsals, and it is charming board members.

The benefits could be great. The relationships between orchestra unions and music directors must be collaborative these days, so the more a director can smooth over conflicts, the better. And having a leader not just willing, but skilled at extra-musical efforts to enthuse people about the art form enhances fund-raising and audience building.

But the musical elements of Honeck's tenure are only just unfolding, with this weekend providing further hints. We already know he will bring a steady diet of canonical Germanic repertoire in his first few years at the helm -- seen from the announcement of next season's lineup. But Honeck hopes this weekend to further show he isn't an empty traditionalist rehashing the standard repertoire but a thoughtful conductor who offers fresh readings even of well-known pieces.

Honeck usually bases his interpretations on historical context and the culture from which works stemmed. It doesn't hurt that the origins of much of the standard rep lie in Honeck's indigenous culture, and have passed through the Vienna Philharmonic, in which he played.

This approach may manifest in Honeck's knowledge of the authentic Viennese waltz rhythm when composers include it. It may be his understanding of a how a German folksong fits in a piece. In a recent performance in Vienna of interpretation of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, "Romantic," for instance, Honeck insisted that his musicians play a usually noble line lighter and more agile because he felt it was meant to imitate a bird call common to Austria.

Honeck will look to do the same this weekend with Richard Strauss' "Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life)." These days this difficult tone poem is viewed more or less as a proving ground for musicians, a stick against which the skill of all orchestras are measured.

But Honeck isn't interested in virtuosity for its own sake. "What do you like to show?" he asks, rhetorically. "Is it your power? Is it your ability to play together in a perfect way? Or do you want to show the story and the program of what is in it, [and make] the music, actually? 'Heldenleben' can be played by a not-so-good orchestra so that people like it, but with an orchestra like Pittsburgh, I think you concentrate on the meaning of all these things."

Meaning is explicit in this work in which Strauss looks back upon his life, including his wife Pauline, his compositions and even his battles with critics. Pauline is portrayed by a solo violin and his critics by woodwinds and brass.

"There are a lot of things from the biographical point of view [that] are very interesting," Honeck says. "It goes so far that I [write] some texts to the music. For example, when you have the last scene with Pauline and Richard, he wrote 'Paulinchen Lieb (Pauline Dear).' What is the reason he wrote her legato? Because it is Paulinchen, [actually] a children's song. For me it is obvious."

Honeck also will take the tempo of the work faster than it is typically done today:

"I am not such a fan of counting duration, but it gives a perspective. I don't want 'Heldenleben' to be performed in what we now call a slow tradition. I want to perform it how Richard Strauss was thinking about. We expect now to have 'Heldenleben' as a monumental piece, a loud piece, though it is not actually always loud. Some things I take really back because it is written not loud, but we play it loud and people get used to hearing it loud."

When it comes to world premieres, Honeck applies his musical intuition and research to the composer's culture. He did so with Iranian-born Reza Vali's "The Being of Love" two years ago, although not without trepidation.

"When I saw the score, I thought to myself, it is not my world. I was never in Iran. There are a lot of things of it from Iranian folk music. I thought from the beginning I have to understand it and go really deep into it. Finally I fell in love with this piece."

Fletcher's Clarinet Concerto, written for the PSO's Michael Rusinek, is the new work on this program. Fletcher has written that Rusinek asked for "the clarinet concerto Samuel Barber never wrote." But in the end, Honeck thinks it is a more individual work by the composer with the clarinetist in mind.

"This is a piece for Michael Rusinek, for his way of thinking," says Honeck. "They know each other so well. It is in a simple way, and the demanding is in the color. It is very difficult for the clarinet, but it is a musical challenge for us all together. I feel that the audience will love it."

The maestro -- guest or not -- will do his best to ensure that.