When I watched Zubin Mehta make his way across the Disney Hall stage last Friday night—his precarious, careful shuffling lending him an air of dignity, of wounded nobility—the question suddenly rose: Has there ever been a more dichotomous conductor than he?
With that brash confidence bestowed only upon arrogant youth, Mehta streaked across the musical firmament of the mid-20th century. His early recordings for Decca, his appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the still tender age of 26 augured the arrival of a talent of earthshaking proportions.
Then—the brilliant comet Mehta somehow, despite its once celestial trajectory, landed on the ground with a dull, resounding, disappointing thud.
Once dazzling Southern California audiences (and others beyond the Sierra Nevada who kept a watchful, hopeful eye) with his bracing programs—Beethoven and Brahms rubbing shoulders with Varèse, Kraft, and Frank Zappa—he suddenly turned timid in middle age; a champion diver who got cold feet when he became aware of the dizzying height from which he had once plunged so fearlessly.
His appointments to the head of the New York Philharmonic, then later the Israel Philharmonic witnessed him in comfortable retreat. The insouciant edge that had once defined the best of his work turned bland; he turned his back on aesthetic candor, embracing instead the commercial. Also-ran recordings of tired warhorses; overblown and questionable stagings of Turandot and Tosca long on spectacle, short on musical integrity; and the three-ring Three Tenors circus act which tossed out the remaining shreds of that integrity in exchange for an easy payday.
At age 83 he remains among the last stragglers of a generation that had followed the passing of the Mengelbergs, the Furtwänglers, the Klemperers; sometimes receiving their mantle with alacrity, at other times chafing reluctantly beneath its weight. Claudio Abbado is gone, Mariss Jansons breathed his last just as 2019 dimmed to a close, Bernard Haitink finally hung up his coat and tails weeks ago, and Daniel Barenboim chugs along—sometimes indifferently, sometimes brilliantly—but who knows for how much longer? Of all of them, Mehta is arguably the most representative, for better or worse.
And yet the heart of the old Mehta—that is to say the young Mehta—still beats within his chest, defying time’s remorseless tread. A few seasons ago he challenged jaded ears here in Los Angeles with a Schubert Ninth so lovingly phrased, so engagingly paced that he made one sit up at attention for once through this often heavenly bore of a work. Then on Friday night, as the din of applause that greeted him at Disney Hall had yet to recede, he launched into Mahler’s “Resurrection,” its growling opening string tremolo instantly searing off the decades that had weighed upon him only moments before.
For the next 80 minutes, the youthful Mehta—and the youthful Mahler who conceived this epic score—returned. The funereal dithyramb of the “Todtenfeier” movement moved along solemnly, passionately, without a moment of slack. Lamentation without sentimentality, tearless grief. Mehta observed the composer’s luftpausen at its hair-raising climax, imparting to the proceedings a sense of wild desperation like that of a caged animal howling against its destiny. The middle movements swayed firm—sweet, sarcastic, and sacred by turns—even if one wished at times that the Los Angeles Philharmonic strings weren’t so seemingly allergic to the expressive vulnerability conveyed by the string portamenti that Mahler demands. In the final movement, a symphonic fresco depicting Judgment Day, the orchestra was roused to heights of virtuosity that outstripped its already world-beating standards.
In recent years, Mahler’s music itself has become a bit shopworn; its originality and power dimmed by mediocre and perfunctory run-throughs; and by too many, much too many performances that have dulled the listener’s senses to its might. But on this night, both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its former music director lived out Mahler’s credo that a score is only the blueprint and that a performer must search beyond it for its music. Together with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, soloists Chen Reiss (soprano), and Mihoko Fujimura (mezzo-soprano) they grasped towards it, found it, and evangelized its otherworldly gospel to their audience with the zeal of an apocalyptic prophet.
The listener was humbled; reminded that behind Zubin Mehta the global brand, so often the herald of the mediocre and perfunctory itself, is a musician of genuine class. For moments like those visited upon the audience in Downtown last Friday, Mehta’s usual schlock and awe is quickly forgiven and gratefully forgotten.