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Katia Labèque is a French pianist known for her longtime collaboration with her younger sister in the Katia & Marielle Labèque piano duo. She was born in 1950 in Hendaye, France, and she started playing the piano when she was five years old. She received early instruction from her mother Ada Cecchi, who was an accomplished pianist and former pupil of Marguerite Long. Her father was also a musician and sang in the choir of the Bordeaux Opera. Later, Labèque and her younger sister Marielle studied piano together under Lucette Descaves at the Paris Conservatory. After they graduated in 1968, they continued their education and enrolled in the cycle de perfectionnement under Jean Hubeau, where they focused on repertoire for two pianos. The following year, they released their debut album Olivier Messiaen: Visions De L'Amen. This was followed by several recordings in the '70s including Bartok: Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion, Rachmaninov: 24 Preludes; Suite No. 2, and Hindemith - Martinu. They became quite popular through their recordings and touring from around this time, but they gained worldwide acclaim after their 1980 album Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue sold over 500,000 copies. The duo became known for their interpretations of both standard repertoire and contemporary works, and composers such as Philip Glass, Luciano Berio, and Arvo Pärt have written pieces especially for them. Labèque was married to jazz fusion guitarist John McLaughlin in the '80s, and they toured together and recorded Belo Horizonte, Music Spoken Here, and Mediterranean. The duo explored Baroque repertoire in the late '90s and performed under many of the top conductors of the genre, including Simon Rattle, John Eliot Gardiner, and Andrea Marcon. After a ten-year-long break from recording, she cofounded the KML Recordings label with her sister in 2007. The label was dedicated to releasing their own recordings and those of young and experimental ensembles from other genres, such as Dream House, Kalakan, and Red Velvet. Labèque remained very active with the piano duo through the 2010s and recorded several albums on the KML label, including Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue; Bernstein: West Side Story and Minimalist Dream House. Since 2020, she has premiered works by Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner and appeared on the albums Nazareno: Bernstein, Stravinsky, Golijov, and Philip Glass: Cocteau Trilogy. ~ RJ Lambert

Marielle Labèque is a French pianist known for her long collaboration with her sister in the Katia and Marielle Labèque piano duo. She also co-founded the Studio KML and KML Recordings label, which supports young and experimental recording artists. She was born in Bayonne in 1952, and both of her parents were musicians. Her father sang in the choir of the Bordeaux Opera, and her mother, Ada Cecchi, was a pianist and former student of Marguerite Long. Labèque and her older sister Katia began learning the piano from their mother in 1955, and later they studied piano at the Paris Conservatory. After her graduation in 1968 she started learning four-hand and two-piano repertoire with her sister under Jean Hubeau in the cycle de perfectionnement, and in 1969 they made their recording debut with the album Olivier Messiaen: Visions De L'Amen. They continued in this genre through the '70s and became very popular, but they gained worldwide acclaim after their 1980 album Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue sold over 500,000 copies. They performed and recorded the standard repertoire and new works by composers such as Philip Glass, Luciano Berio, and Arvo Pärt. Labèque and her sister explored Baroque repertoire in the late '90s and performed under many of the top conductors of the genre, including Simon Rattle, John Eliot Gardiner, and Andrea Marcon. It was also around this time when Labèque married conductor Semyon Bychkov. After a ten-year-long break from recording, she cofounded the KML Recordings label with her sister in 2007, where they released their own records and those of young and experimental ensembles from other genres, such as Dream House, Kalakan, and Red Velvet. Labèque remained very active with the piano duo through the 2010s and recorded several albums on the KML label, including Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue; Bernstein: West Side Story and Minimalist Dream House. Since 2020 she has appeared on the albums Nazareno: Bernstein, Stravinsky, Golijov and Dream House Quartet. Labèque resides with her sister in a palace in Rome and travels with her husband. ~ RJ Lambert

One of the best-known conductors of the last quarter of the 20th century, Zubin Mehta is known for his flamboyant, passionate style on the podium. A conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestras for many years, he has appeared with orchestras all over the world and has sought to use classical music as a force for peace in troubled regions.

Mehta was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), in British-controlled India, on April 29, 1936. His first language was Gujarati, and the family adhered to the Parsi religion. His father, Mehli Mehta, was a violinist and conductor who co-founded the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. Part of the key to Zubin's later confidence and success as a conductor is that he began very early; his father taught him to play violin and piano and to conduct, and from his early teens, he was leading sectional rehearsals with the Bombay Symphony; he took rehearsals with the entire ensemble at 16. Mehta's mother wanted him to study medicine, and he enrolled at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, with that aim, but after two years, he dropped out and moved to Vienna, Austria. Living on a shoestring, he took conducting lessons from Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music and learned the double bass so he could find orchestral work. After winning a contest, he received a one-year appointment as the assistant conductor with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. This led to prestigious guest conducting posts with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra and then, in 1960 and 1962, respectively, to music director posts with the Montreal Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For the former post, he had help from Charles Munch, whom he had impressed at a contest at the Tanglewood Music Festival. The jet-setting conductor who holds posts in far-flung cities has become commonplace, but Mehta was one of the first whose career followed the pattern. He built the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the major U.S. orchestras.

Mehta resigned his Montreal post in 1967, beginning a long association with the Israel Philharmonic that came to an end only in 2017. An early recording was one of Puccini's Tosca, starring soprano Leontyne Price, for the RCA label in 1973. Mehta left the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1978, succeeding Pierre Boulez as the music director of the New York Philharmonic. He remained in New York until 1991. Mehta also became the music director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, entering into the musical life of Florence and later becoming an honorary citizen of that city. The tendency to engage with an orchestra's surroundings rather than simply flying in to conduct could be seen especially clearly in his work with the Israel Philharmonic, which he conducted during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon (where he conducted for both Israeli and Arab audiences, with the latter receiving him enthusiastically), and the 1991 Gulf War.

Conducting the internationally televised Three Tenors concerts featuring Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras, Mehta gained wide public exposure for his outsized style, perfectly suited to these concerts. After leaving his New York Philharmonic post, Mehta assumed the music directorship of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1998, remaining in that post until 2006. He also became the music director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain, in 2005. During the 1990s and 2000s, Mehta took the opportunity to conduct orchestras and operas in large, one-of-a-kind events. In 1992, he conducted a performance of Puccini's opera Tosca, starring Domingo as Cavaradossi, at the actual places specified in the score in real time. Mehta conducted a similar production of Puccini's Turandot in China in 1998, directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou, with 300 soldiers and 300 extras.

Mehta's recording catalog is one of the most extensive of any contemporary conductor, comprising well over 200 albums. His output focuses on Romantic orchestral repertory, most often from the second half of the 19th century, but encompasses a startling variety of music, from early American composer John Knowles Paine to Schoenberg to opera and film soundtracks (he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Frank Zappa's film 200 Motels in 1971), to Vienna's Summer Night and New Year's concerts. He has rarely recorded contemporary music. Mehta remained active into old age, releasing a new recording of Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung, Hob. 21/2, with the Munich Philharmonic in 2021, when he was 85. He conducted the Australian World Orchestra at concerts in Melbourne and Sydney in 2022 and released several new recordings, including one of works by Bruckner and Schumann, featuring pianist Martha Argerich in Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 2024. By that time, his catalog comprised some 300 recordings. ~ James Manheim

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra serves as an unofficial Israeli national orchestra and is regarded as a cultural treasure of the Jewish state. However, the group performs a wide variety of repertory from many countries.

European-style classical music performances began to take root in the Palestine region as early as the 1880s, and music education institutions were opened after World War I as the idea of Palestine as a Jewish homeland developed. However, a full-scale symphony orchestra was not founded until Jews began to flee Nazi Germany en masse in the 1930s. The key mover was violinist Bronislaw Huberman, who encouraged Jewish musicians forced to leave their posts in German orchestras to join the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which he founded in 1936. The group's premiere performance was conducted by the anti-Nazi Arturo Toscanini. On that first concert, music by Wagner was heard, but since then, the orchestra has generally avoided his works. Huberman worked tirelessly to arrange immigration documents for the new musicians and their families, and he is thought to have saved some 1,000 people from German death camps. William Steinberg was the new orchestra's music advisor and frequently conducted the group in its early years; Leonard Bernstein held the same position in the late '40s and continued to appear with the group, making some of its first recordings in the late '50s. After the Israeli state was established in 1948, the group was renamed the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. For many years, it was led by guest conductors and advisors, including Paul Paray, Jean Martinon, and, from 1969 to 1977, Zubin Mehta. Mehta became the orchestra's first music director in 1977 and remained in that position until 2019; in 2020, he was succeeded by Lahav Shani, but he remained active as music director emeritus. The group is a cooperative owned by its musicians.

The modern Israel Philharmonic Orchestra has about 110 members. Its main performance venue is the Heichal HaTarbut concert hall in Tel Aviv, formerly known as Mann Auditorium; the group also performs regularly in Haifa and Jerusalem and in various foreign countries. In 2011, the orchestra's performance at the BBC Proms was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protestors. The group frequently plays host to world-class soloists and guest conductors. Programming is cosmopolitan but frequently features works by Israeli composers. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra released the album Tradition, featuring Israeli melodies, performed by guest violinist Itzhak Perlman, in 1987 on the Angel label, and the group recorded for Angel, EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, and other labels through the '80s and '90s. In 2006, the orchestra established its own Helicon Classics label, which reissued many of its earlier LP recordings. The orchestra has issued many recordings in Helicon Classics but continued its association with Deutsche Grammophon, releasing a recording of Paul Ben-Haim's Symphony No. 1 on that label in 2022. By the early 2020s, the orchestra's recording catalog comprised some 80 items. ~ James Manheim