Zubin Mehta

Zubin Mehta, born in Bombay in 1936, is among the most enduring conductors of the postwar era, with a career now stretching across more than six decades. The son of Mehli Mehta, founder of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, he trained not in music at first but in medicine, before abandoning it for the Vienna Academy of Music and the conducting class of Hans Swarowsky, where Claudio Abbado was a fellow student. Vienna has remained central to his life ever since: his association with the Vienna Philharmonic goes back to the early 1960s, and he has led its New Year’s Concert five times. He served as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1962–78) and the New York Philharmonic (1978–91), the latter the longest tenure in that orchestra’s history, and held a long directorship at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence. His deepest bond, though, is with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which named him Music Director for Life in 1981 and Music Director Emeritus on his retirement from the post in 2019. A conductor steeped in the Austro-German repertoire that anchors tonight’s programme, Mehta brings to Beethoven and the German Romantics a lifetime’s intimacy with this very orchestra and this very city.