No conductor has left a deeper mark on the Berliner Philharmoniker than Zubin Mehta. His first appearance with the orchestra was nearly 65 years ago, and in the time since, three generations of players have shared the stage with him – a record that speaks for itself. A wealth of unforgettable concert experiences binds the Berliner Philharmoniker to the Maestro, who among many milestone occasions conducted the memorial concert in honour of his late friend Claudio Abbado. In 2019, the year of a joint tour of Japan, he was appointed honorary member of the orchestra. On 29th April 2026, Zubin Mehta turns 90. Many happy returns, Maestro! Celebrate this remarkable milestone with the Berliner Philharmoniker and explore the highlights of one of music’s great artistic partnerships in the archive of the Digital Concert Hall.
“We were like brothers”, Zubin Mehta has said of his fifty-year friendship with Claudio Abbado. In this deeply moving concert, Mehta and the Berliner Philharmoniker paid tribute to the orchestra’s former chief conductor, who had died just days earlier, with the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
Mehta and Murray Perahia join forces for Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto – a work of equal parts tempest and grace. The programme also features Richard Strauss’s “Symphonia domestica”, in which Mehta proves himself a natural Strauss conductor, shaping the score with warmth, colour and an instinctive feel for its shifting moods.
In his late-Romantic Symphony No. 3, Camille Saint-Saëns deployed the organ to startling effect, creating a stroke of orchestral boldness that retains its power to astonish. Working with the Philharmoniker, Zubin Mehta drew out the work’s sweeping dramatic arcs and sculpted its subtlest gradations of colour with masterly control.
A tribute to the music of Mehta’s Indian homeland. Anoushka Shankar, daughter of the legendary sitar player and composer Ravi Shankar, performs her father’s “Raga-Mālā”, a concerto that brings together the Western concert tradition and the improvisatory spirit of Indian classical music in a genuinely captivating encounter.
When Mehta made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1961, he was just 25 years old and opened with Mahler’s First Symphony. Here he returns to Mahler on an even grander scale conducting the sprawling, life-affirming Third, a work that has long held a special place in the relationship of conductor and orchestra.
Yefim Bronfman first appeared with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1983, with Mehta on the podium. Forty years later, the two old friends were reunited for Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto and the results are remarkable. Through every rhythmic twist and lyrical passage, you can hear the ease and understanding of two musicians who have known each other for a lifetime.
