See moreThe New Year’s Concert live from Vienna is one of the world’s most famous and spectacular classical music events. It is broadcast from the flower-filled Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein on TV and radio in almost 80 countries around the world with over 40 million viewers.
The annual New Year's Day Concert in Vienna has been a major event for more than seven decades. The resulting recordings with works from the Strauss dynasty and their contemporaries are among the most classical important releases available today.
For the 2015 concert, the Vienna Philharmonic has invited Zubin Mehta to conduct. This will be the fifth time that Maestro Mehta has ascended the podium. He previously conducted in 1990, 1995, 1998 and 2007.
The list of conductors who have led the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concerts reads like a veritable who’s who of great maestros including Herbert von Karajan, Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Seiji Ozawa, Mariss Jansons, and Franz Welser-Möst among many more.
World-renowned Indian conductor Zubin Mehta (b.1936) and the Vienna Philharmonic share many years of intensive artistic collaboration with one another. Even in Mehta’s youth, Vienna was at the centre of his musical interest, having completed his education under Hans Swarovsky at the Music Academy and observed his future musical colleagues from the standing room in the Musikverein.
In 1961, he conducted his first concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, and in 2001 after 40 years of artistic collaboration, he was awarded Honorary Membership in the Vienna Philharmonic as the orchestra's longest serving conductor.