Eliahu Inbal

Eliahu Inbal was born in 1936 in Jerusalem

Eliahu Inbal was born in Jerusalem on 16 February 1936. He studied violin at the Israeli Academy of Music and took composition lessons with Paul Ben-Haim.

Leonard Bernstein heard him play and backed a scholarship for him to study conducting at the Conservatoire de Paris. He also studied with Sergiu Celibidache and Franco Ferrara in Hilversum, Netherlands. In 1963 he won first prize at the Guido Cantelli conducting competition in Novara.

His early concerts were mostly in Italy. After a 1965 debut with the London Philharmonic, he worked with many orchestras in Britain, Europe and America, and later took joint British citizenship.

From 1974 to 1990 he was principal conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, where he was the first to record the original versions of several Bruckner symphonies. He was chief conductor at La Fenice in Venice from 1984 to 1989 and of the Czech Philharmonic from 2009. He also led the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra from 2008 to 2014.

In August 2019 he became chief conductor of the Taipei Symphony Orchestra. He left the post in 2022 and became the orchestra's conductor laureate in 2023.