MUSIC REVIEW : Mehta Returns to Philharmonic With Bruckner, Berg

It seemed just like old times Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Well, almost like old times.

Zubin Mehta was on the podium. Berg and Bruckner were on the program. The 3,200-seat house was virtually full (that certainly has not been the case on many recent Thursdays). The mood was festive. The audience was happy.

But some things had obviously changed. The former boss is now a guest. The dashing matinee idol of yore looks a bit portly at 55, and he even allows a little gray to color his temples. Although one certainly could not describe his demeanor as subdued, some of the old frenzy seems to have mellowed.

Mehta’s visits to Los Angeles have been infrequent since he departed for the supposedly greener pastures of New York in 1978. In the interim, our orchestra has gone through two other music directors--two and a half if you count the incipient heir to the post--plus countless personnel changes. The subscription concert on Thursday was Mehta’s first since 1987.

His tenure in Fun City was long--it ended only this year. The fun may have been compromised, however, by an acrimonious relationship with the New York press, not to mention relative neglect from the broadcast media and recording companies.

For his return to Southern California, Mehta chose the sort of music he has always done best. The concert began with the gentle agonies of Berg’s Violin Concerto, written the year of the composer’s death, which happened to be the year before the conductor’s birth.

After this brief prelude (which necessitated a premature intermission), the maestro turned to the rambling heroism of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, a momentous challenge that he had recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic long, long ago.

This, clearly, was a sentimental occasion. It represented the first of many promised returns--happy ones, we stubbornly hope--now that Mehta is free of permanent commitments to other American orchestras.

We will soon learn, no doubt, whether the passing years have made him increasingly sensitive to music that requires subtlety and introspection for maximum impact. It will take time, in any case, for him to assert his authority with an essentially unfamiliar orchestra that does not--cannot--make music with automatic precision for short-term visitors.

The performances on Thursday were notable for spirit, warmth and easy extroversion. Technically, they tended toward raggedness. Some things have not changed.

Midori, the 20-year-old soloist in the Berg Concerto, approached the convoluted melodies and bravura knots with infinite delicacy that tended toward intimate rapture. It is a perfectly legitimate approach--an approach that acknowledges Berg’s romantic roots as it honors the elegiac nature of music that the composer dedicated “to the memory of an Angel” (Alma Mahler’s 18-year-old daughter).

Mehta supported Midori’s arching pathos, phrase for phrase and breath for breath. He could not match her dynamic scale, however, and the orchestra frequently blanketed her thread of tone.

In the Bruckner Eighth, Mehta could exult in 80 minutes of legitimate grandiosity (the Nowak version of 1954 remains his edition of choice). Other conductors do their best to minimize the rhetorical swell, but, for better of worse, this conductor goes with the sprawl.

Under his increasingly leisurely baton, the lyrical sentiment always sounded luxurious, and the dramatic exclamations were invariably cataclysmic. Mehta’s Bruckner sighed eloquently, rambled knowingly, lingered affectionately, rumbled portentously.

It made more of the cries, perhaps, than of the whimpers--never mind whispers in this context. Still, it often sustained tension against the odds. More than in the past, it savored--and stretched--the calms between the storms.

Understatement wasn’t Bruckner’s forte, and it still doesn’t seem to be Mehta’s. The match remains eminently reasonable.