Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 New York Philharmonic & Zubin Mehta

• 1 I. Allegro non troppo 16:04
• 2 II. Adagio non troppo - L'istesso tempo, ma grazioso 09:16
• 3 III. Allegretto grazioso (Quasi Andantino) - Presto ma non assai 05:22
• 4 IV. Allegro con spirito 08:54
• Total Runtime 39:36

Info for Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73

“I became a conductor”, Zubin Mehta revealed in his autobiography, “because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms’s four symphonies and Richard Strauss’s tone poems.” To celebrate the maestro’s 80th birthday in 2016, Sony Classical is pleased to present the first-ever release on HighResAudio of Mehta’s cycle, made in the late 1970s and early 80s with the New York Philharmonic.

Born in Bombay in 1936, Zubin Mehta was just 18 when he went to Vienna – the adopted home of Brahms – and became a pupil of the Music Academy’s legendary conducting teacher Hans Swarowsky. In 1958 he won the Liverpool International Conducting Competition as well as a prize at Tanglewood, and within three years he had already conducted the Philharmonic orchestras of Vienna, Berlin and Israel. In 1978 Mehta succeeded Pierre Boulez as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, commencing a tenure that lasted 13 years, still the longest in the history of America’s oldest orchestra.

Right from the start, Mehta’s programming in New York centered on Viennese works, repertoire from that city where, in his own words, he had experienced his “musical coming-of-age”. In the first few years of his music directorship, Mehta conducted the Philharmonic in all of the Brahms symphonies, “Haydn” Variations and Academic Festival Overture and recorded them for American Columbia. Gramophone’s reviewer lauded Mehta’s “superior degree of orchestral control”.

During the same period, with his close friends and collaborators Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman, Isaac Stern and Lynn Harrell, Mehta and his New York orchestra recorded all the Brahms concertos. After hearing Barenboim and Mehta in the First Piano Concerto in concert in February 1979, when this recording was made, the New York Times wrote that “conductor and pianist merged in the opening movement into one indivisible entity, so that one’s attention was concentrated on the power and beauty of this familiar music in a way that rarely happens … The Adagio was one long, unbroken song, filled with exquisite interplay among the piano and orchestral soloists.”

New York Philharmonic
Zubin Mehta, conductor

Digitally remastered

The New York Philharmonic
plays a leading cultural role in New York City, the United States, and the world. Each season the Orchestra connects with up to 50 million music lovers through live concerts in New York and around the world, international broadcasts, recordings, education programs, and the New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives. The 2018–19 season marks Jaap van Zweden’s first as Music Director. The Philharmonic has commissioned and / or premiered works by leading composers from every era since its founding in 1842, including Dvořák’s New World Symphony, John Adams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning On the Transmigration of Souls, and Wynton Marsalis’s The Jungle (Symphony No. 4). This commitment continues in 2018–19, when Jaap van Zweden leads the Philharmonic in the World Premieres of commissions by Ashley Fure, Conrad Tao, Louis Andriessen, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang. A resource for its community and the world, the Philharmonic complements its annual free citywide Concerts in the Parks, Presented by Didi and Oscar Schafer, with Philharmonic Free Fridays, its famed Young People’s Concerts, and the Shanghai Orchestra Academy and Partnership. The oldest American symphony orchestra and one of the oldest in the world, the New York Philharmonic has made more than 2,000 recordings since 1917 and produced its first-ever Facebook Live concert broadcast in 2016.

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