Born
in Bombay in 1936, Zubin Mehta turned seventy in April. The
peaks of his career need little elaboration. Mid-50s:
student of Hans Swarowsky’s at the
Vienna Academy of Music, a stable which that decade
also produced Abbado and Tjeknavorian. 1958: first
prize,
Liverpool International Conducting Competition. 1961:
first London
concert (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra). 1961-67: Music
Director of the Montreal Symphony, succeeding Markevitch.
Aged twenty-four. 1962-78: Music Director of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, succeeding Solti. 1964:
opera débuts
- Montreal (Tosca), La Scala (Salome).
1965: Metropolitan Opera début (Aida). 1969:
Music Adviser to the Israel Philharmonic. 1977: Royal
Opera House début (Otello). Music Director of the Israel
Philharmonic, assuming life title four years later. 1978-91:
Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, succeeding
Boulez. 1985: appointed Chief Conductor of the Maggio
Musicale, Florence. 1998: appointed General Music Director
of the Bavarian State Opera and Bavarian State Orchestra,
Munich. Not a bad record for a Commonwealth boy who, following
a season of apprenticeship at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
(1958-59) under the inspirationally flaccid, temperamentally
incompatible John Pritchard, could find no further work
in Britain.
Unlike the Americans,
the British have long had difficulty accepting that anyone
east of the former Habsburg heartlands, and especially
those from the Mediterranean basin to central/sub-continental
Asia – people,
in other words, without Western European/Russian/Far Eastern
musical patrimony - might actually have something artistically
worthwhile to say. This is to generalize, of course. Yet
in forty years I’ve met and worked with enough prejudiced,
discriminatory, sitting-on-the-fence, silently sceptical
souls in the broadcasting, festival and journalistic ‘establishment’ to
understand what Mehta’s lot must have been like in those
early days. Read Noël Goodwin, then critic of the Daily
Express, in the 1980 New Grove, and you’ll
find him waging a less than complimentary in-between-the-lines
agenda:
‘His performances
generally favour romantic warmth of expression and voluptuous
sonority, combined with bold attack and rhythmic vigour
and reinforced by boundless self-confidence. An awareness
of his audience is often reflected in platform gestures indicative
not so much of the musical content as of the desired response
of the audience to it’ (my italics).
(Which he does
not retract but adds to in the 2001 edition: ‘at times [Mehta’s]
concern for theatrical effect has been at the expense of
musical depth’.)
Contrast the
attitude of Harold C. Schonberg in the New York Times: ‘Mr.
Mehta is a conductor of temperament and of no mean technical
skill. He is a man of virtuoso flair and makes the most of
it’. ‘If Mr. Mehta is a virtuoso glamour-boy conductor, he
is also a musician of sensibility. If he favours dynamic
extremes, he also has the technique and control to use them
in a tasteful manner.’ In the sorry RLPO sojourn, the orchestra,
we read in Bookspan and Yockey’s 1978 biography, apparently ‘did
not enjoy working under him’ – hence his dismissal. Later,
better, bands disagreed. Royal Opera House: ‘Mehta has this
appearance of being a whizzkid, but nothing could be further
from the truth. He is a very serious musician, very well
prepared and very popular’. ‘Immensely practical and very
human, too, eager to ensure that everyone is comfortable
and to have a good atmosphere’. New York Philharmonic: ‘Mehta
[…] invariably commands marvellous discipline’. Wiener
Philharmoniker: a conductor ‘who has music in his blood [and]
is very convincing with his gestures […] a brisk, sure musician
who can electrify the players. There is never a dull moment
with Zubin Mehta’. The best testimonial comes perhaps from
Kiri te Kanawa: ‘he has this fantastic and immensely reassuring
aura, an effortless authority […] everything [will] be
all right. He always listens to what you think and want
to do
and then adds his own comments and little adjustments
here and there. A very exciting, wonderful man to work
with.
A real man’ (Helen Matheopoulos, Maestro, London:
1982).
Never one to
follow the book, Mehta has always gone his own way, doing
what he wants in his own fashion, controversy be damned.
From Messiaen, the Second Viennese School and Penderecki
to John Williams cross-over. From the 1990 World Cup Three
Tenors to the New Year’s Day morning-dress
concert/ballet extravaganzas from Vienna (1990, 1995,
1998 - still doing the rounds on satellite/cable
television). Complete Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms or
Bruckner symphony
cycles may be discographically necessary, essential,
to other conductors (his friends Abbado and Barenboim,
for
instance)
but not for him. Given the right conditions and chemistry – individually,
corporately – he has the capacity to yield a high return. ‘The
quality he likes best and looks for in human beings is warmth. “I
know I should say honesty, but it has to be warmth. I just
can’t deal with cold people. I have nothing to say to them
[…] What I absolutely detest, in either sex, is neutrality.
And there seem to be an awful lot of neutral people in the
world”’ (Matheopoulos).
Decca’s 70th birthday
box focuses mainly on the Los Angeles period, when Mehta
transformed a backwater assortment of Californian individuals
into a world-class force. In an atmospheric accompanying
essay, Cyrus Meher-Homji, Marketing and Repertoire Manager
for Universal Music Australia’s classical
division, sketches those heady times:
‘Lunchtime on the top of Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in
the 1960s must have been something of an event […] Zubin
Mehta, with his flamboyance and his dashing good looks,
created something of a midday buzz. As the young conductor
doused his bland American food with Tabasco sauce, the
ladies of the Philharmonic (those responsible for funding
and administrative tasks) would ensure they caught their
daily glimpse! So it was that he became “Zubi Baby” to
some, much to his own chagrin and completely at odds
with the serious, creative, driven side of his personality.’
As an ambitious eighteen-year-old Mehta had been
spotted by John Culshaw in Vienna. By the time he
and the LAPO
joined Decca,
the occasion ‘signalled the first exclusive contract
ever signed between an American orchestra and a major
European recording company’. The film-star glamorous
Mehta made headlines, his ‘sable locks, honey-coloured
aquiline features and voracious energy,’ reported Time magazine,
giving ‘him the appeal of a matinee idol and [making]
him a kind of culture hero’. Picturing the logistics
of location analogue stereo recording in the 1960s, Meher-Homji
cameos that:-
‘ the
recording crew arrived from London. With them were
fifty-six crates weighing more than two-and-a-half tonnes.
Culshaw
and his engineers Arthur Haddy and Gordon Parry announced
that the recording sessions would be held in the University
of California, Los Angeles’ Royce Hall. A whole new
stage platform had to be built, strong enough for the
musicians,
their instruments and the microphones. All very well,
except that the entire set-up had to be dismantled
regularly between
sessions because the hall had been booked for lectures
and for performances by the American Ballet Theater’.
Looking back
to the 1960s and 1970s life for many of us was as much
about Mehta’s latest American, Richard Strauss or Tchaikovsky
LP as the Beatles and Stones, Dylan and Baez, flower
children
and glam rock, the Profumo Affair, Lady Chatterley’s
Lover,
the Kennedys, Luther King, Cuba, Vietnam, Prague, the
US/USSR space race, Solti’s Ring … To us then
Mehta was an iconic figure, along with Ozawa one of a
new breed of fresh,
brilliant Asiatics. His presence brought sheer electricity
into the concert room.
This vibe comes
across in the present collection. One can only smile
at the audacious triumph of so much of it. Not only can
you
hear,
you can almost see, touch, an astonishing baton technique
and body-language at work – eyes, facial muscles and shoulders
as important as hands, economy as much in evidence as energy.
He gets his orchestra to enjoy themselves and take pride
in their personality and virtuosity. Nothing is stretched
or strained. Every department is fabulous, rehearsed to an
extreme point, then given its head. Solos are the stuff of
fantasy, tuttis are tight and stunning, climaxes pole-axe
the acoustic. The closer you get to know these performances,
the more remarkable becomes Mehta’s feat. He has an unerring
sense of line and architectural span. His attention to balance,
detail, timbre, contrasts and dynamics is phenomenal. He
somehow combines firmness of framework and pulse with flights
of delirious fantasy and freedom. Tempo and tempo relationships,
even when unexpected, are hard to fault. He’s an artist
who knows only too well that in an allegro or presto a
rhythmically clean passage at a comfortable ‘speaking’ speed
will sound ‘faster’ than one gabbled more briskly. Put the
spotlight on any strand of any score and you won’t be
disappointed. Each is a chrome-plated tour-de-force,
the finest injected
with a vibrant supply of emotion, sensuality, imagination,
and theatrical intensity.
The man, the
conception, the means - all in agreement. The engineering – supportive
to the end. That the multi-tracked, spot-miked performances
before us are so vivid, so physically enormous, attacking
and involving, so quintessentially synonymous with sonic
splendour, must go down to Decca technology. To the gifted
British balance engineers in charge – Simon Eadon, James
Lock (Daphnis et Chloé, Le sacre de printemps, The
Planets, Also sprach Zarathustra), Michael
Mailes, Gordon Parry, Colin Moorfoot. And to the over-seeing
control
of four undisputed master producers of the old school – John
Culshaw, Ray Minshull, John Mordler, Christopher Raeburn.
With such a team behind him, and enough charisma and
adrenalin to fuel Superman, what else could Mehta do
but rock the
galaxy?
My favourites
among these performances, in no particular order, would
have to be the clutch of overtures and preludes; a great Candide;
a Suppé lollipop marginally quicker and more on the wing
than the 1989 Vienna remake; luscious Verdi. Ravel’s La
valse and Daphnis. The Stravinsky and Ives:
is there a better controlled/differentiated multi-contour Decoration
Day in the catalogue? The Planets, reaffirming
just how much Hollywood’s music ‘space’-men owe Holst. Von
Einem’s Philadelphia Symphony. Strauss’s Zarathustra,
gramophone and audiophile landmark of the Apollo 8 year.
Just occasionally the re-mastering is not ideal – the
odd tape drop-out (von Einem), the occasional editing
blip
(Le
sacre), artless ambience cut-offs (John Williams).
But it would be churlish to go into detail. The cumulative
effect
of nearly eight hours of music-making is jaw-dropping.
According to the American
ArkivMusic.com site (1 June 2006), Mehta ranks joint
sixth among the world’s current ten ‘most popular’ conductors
(based
on individual albums/sets, compilations, sundry packagings):
Ranking |
Conductor |
Available
Titles |
1 |
Karajan |
767 |
2 |
Marriner |
534 |
3 |
Bernstein |
391 |
4 |
Abbado |
372 |
5 |
Böhm |
307 |
6 |
C. Davis |
302 |
|
Mehta |
302 |
8 |
Solti |
294 |
9 |
Järvi |
293 |
10 |
Ormandy |
287 |
In recent years
I confess to having drawn back from his work - maybe because
auto-piloting things like the New Year’s Day concerts or
the Wiener Philharmoniker Drumroll at the 2005 Proms
does neither him nor the music any favours. Not, mind you,
that ‘auto-piloting’ is how he’d describe it. No. ‘Standing
back’ he’d probably prefer. Touring Europe with the Israel
Phil in 1979, he led Mahler Five ‘at least fifteen times’: ‘to
play it night after night with this orchestra who know it
so well and whom I know so well, made it possible for me
to just stand back and let it unfold – one of the deepest,
greatest pleasures I have experienced’ (my italics).
Well, the Mahler Fifth I witnessed I remember more for its
professionalism and technical fireworks than any special
emotional depth, communication, or colour. ‘Standing back’ on
that occasion generated simply a voltage decrease, a tangible
softening of impact, polite applause. Interesting to ponder
the then principal viola of the Royal Opera House Orchestra
voicing the thought that ‘sometimes [Mehta] seems to go down
slightly after the first night, as though he were not quite
as interested or tense as before’ (Matheopoulos).
If there’s any reservation about this
anthology, it’s the glints of ‘go down’ amber-lighting the
Achilles heel waiting a few years down the road. The once
best-selling Boléro (1972), for instance, seems less
seductively compelling than slickly creamed-off, a routine
job. And in Bruckner Eight (1974) the tingle factor doesn’t
come into play until 120 seconds from the end, 76 minutes
too late. Superbness of execution notwithstanding, casualties
both, I suggest, of the risk run, dramatically and rhetorically,
when ‘things are going at a steady pace’ and the reins are
eased to let a ‘whole orchestra take over’? ‘It’s
like driving a six-horse carriage: if all the horses are
perfectly coordinated, what are you going to whip them for?
[…] getting to this stage is a great comfort for a conductor,
and that’s why I feel that, with my own orchestras, I’m sitting
in an easy chair’.
Mehta of the ‘easy
chair’? Not my heaven. The man firing on all cylinders, ‘standing
on air’, the LA sessions at their best? That’s another matter.
Ateş Orga
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Los
Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra; *Israel Philharmonic
Orchestra; †Wiener Philharmoniker/Zubin Mehta; ††additionally
Los Angeles Master Chorale/Roger Wagner 
