Zubin Mehta at Kolarac Oct 23: Wagner, Schubert, Dvorak
The gala concert with the Belgrade Philharmonic is Friday at 8 pm, the 19th time the conductor has stood before this orchestra, in the year of his 90th birthday.
When Zubin Mehta last stood on the Kolarac stage, the audience kept him on the podium with a fifteen-minute ovation, and he told them: “After conducting the greatest orchestras in the world, I can tell you that the Belgrade Philharmonic is one of the best!”
That conductor returns on Friday, October 23, 2026, for a Gala Concert in the Great Hall of the Kolarac Endowment. It starts at 8 pm, and tickets are already on sale. Prices are not listed in the announcements available so far.
What is Mehta conducting at Kolarac?
The program has three works:
- the overture to the opera “Rienzi” by Richard Wagner
- Symphony No. 3 by Franz Schubert
- Symphony No. 7 by Antonin Dvorak
That is one overture and two symphonies, with no soloist on the bill, so this is an evening carried by the orchestra and its conductor.
Why is this concert special for the Philharmonic?
The Belgrade Philharmonic will perform with Mehta for the 19th time. Their friendship goes back to 1958, when the orchestra gave a young conductor at the start of his career one of his first professional chances. Almost seven decades of joint work have passed since that first meeting.
Jelena Milasinovic, the Belgrade Philharmonic’s PR manager, told N1 that the audience can expect a meeting of friendship and the highest musical art, with the maestro as the orchestra’s greatest friend, and that his career has put humanity in his debt. For that reason, she says, the jubilee does not belong only to the world of music:
“That is why his birthday and jubilee belong to the whole world, not only the musical one but the entire public, because we know how devoted Maestro Mehta is to speaking through music about some important topics, to bringing people together, to building bridges between cultures, and doing it where other tools fail”
According to N1, Mehta himself says Belgrade is a city he “always returns to with joy.” Milasinovic adds:
“Zubin Mehta’s devotion to communicating with the audience in the language of music is moving, and especially in times that are very uncertain and unstable, it truly embraces us with something more important, more valuable, more universal than everything else”
What does Mehta’s jubilee year look like?
Zubin Mehta turned 90 at the end of April 2026, and the celebration began in mid-January with concerts in his native Mumbai, where the Belgrade Philharmonic performed with him. The international tour of the jubilee runs through Barcelona, Vienna, Munich and Berlin. Belgrade is part of that sequence at the conductor’s explicit choice, alongside Mumbai and other music centers.
The Philharmonic opened this season under the name Fortissimo, which we have already covered, and the concert with Mehta follows that opening.
Who is Zubin Mehta?
He was born in 1936 in Bombay, and got his first musical education from his father Mehli Mehta, founder of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. He started studying medicine, then in 1954 went to Vienna to study conducting in the class of Hans Swarowsky at the Academy of Music. He won the international conducting competition in Liverpool in 1958, the same year his connection with the Belgrade orchestra began.
He led orchestras in Montreal, Los Angeles and New York. He has been music director of the Israel Philharmonic since 1977 and music director for life since 1981, and has conducted it in more than 2,000 concerts on five continents. From 1998 to 2006 he was music director of the Bavarian State Opera. He is also the founder of the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation in Bombay, which teaches more than 300 children Western music.
