INTERVIEW : Escape Artist : Zubin Mehta--back for a spell with the L.A. Philharmonic--acknowledges a love for the New York orchestra he led for 13 years . . . but not the city

It was the first day of rehearsal. Conductor Zubin Mehta crossed the stage, took his place in front of the the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and simply stood there smiling. He faced the brass and the woodwind sections, then turned to take in the string sections.

“I’m just looking around,” he said finally. “I’m very happy to see you.”

You bet he was. One look at their faces, and he knew this was a receptive group of people. And after 13 years of leading the New York Philharmonic to an increasingly critical press and often less-than-enthusiastic public, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s former leader was clearly glad to be home.

Mehta, who led the orchestra from 1962-78, never gave up his house in Brentwood and headed west every chance he could. He’s only visiting, but as of last May he is no longer the music director in New York, no longer bound to 20 weeks each season there. On New Year’s Eve this year, he’ll be onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, not Avery Fisher Hall.

The subscription concerts Mehta led earlier this month, his first here in four years, were just the start. Both Mehta and Philharmonic impresario Ernest Fleischmann predict annual visits, and Mehta is already booked for the next two seasons. He’ll also be back at the Music Center in early January, then again in April.

Mehta certainly does seem expansive, saying one nice thing after another both to and about individual orchestra members. Musicians and staff alike describe him with words like sunny and mellow , but Mehta dismisses their remarks, saying it’s the Bruckner symphony he’s conducting that’s mellow, not him--”If I was doing Bartok, they wouldn’t find me too mellow.”

Yet, in his dressing room a while later, Mehta is asked how it feels to have New York behind him. Leaning back on a sofa, breaking into a wide smile, the 55-year-old musician throws both arms in the air and screams: “I’m freeeeeee.”

Well, sort-of free. He’s still locked in to at least three months a year as music director of the Israel Philharmonic, eight weeks a year as chief conductor of the Maggio Musicale Festival in Florence, and so many opera and symphony dates around the world that he can’t even fit in a stop at the Chicago Symphony’s summer home in Ravinia, where his own brother runs the place.

And don’t misunderstand his outburst, he says quickly. “I mean I’m free of that city,” he explains. “I never got used to the city and I really loved my orchestra.”

Just a few days ago, for instance, he received a rough edit of a new Wagner recording with the New York Philharmonic. There he was, listening to the cassette in his car: “I’m driving along sometimes with tears in my eyes hearing those people. They are just an absolutely phenomenal orchestra. I miss the standard of the New York Philharmonic’s playing very much. It has certainly been a high point in my life.

“It’s sort of a conflict within me--I want to go back to conduct them and I don’t want to go back to New York. This is my problem. . . . My rapport with the orchestra the last five seasons was such that I had only pleasure with them. In fact, New York wanted to extend the contract. I was the one who said no.”

When he first went to New York, says Mehta, “it was already a great orchestra (although) with a lot of lapses, a lot of voices that were not on today’s level. This was an open secret. Bit by bit, I brought in 42 new players which included (nearly all) the solo players. That made a huge difference to the orchestra.”

Mehta remained in New York longer than anyone before him, conducting more than 1,000 concerts before his last appearance as music director in May. Under his direction, the New York Philharmonic commissioned 30 new works and introduced 425 soloists. He established regular orchestra visits to Harlem, participated in more than 30 recordings and led the orchestra on major tours of Europe, Asia, Russia and elsewhere.

“So what was rather sad about this whole newspaper business was that the better the orchestra got, after the first four or five seasons, the worse the reviews,” Mehta says. “This is what nobody could understand--didn’t they listen those first years? Now, when it’s going so well, why are they picking on us?

“It got to the point the orchestra was so grooved and so well oiled that I had great pleasure as a conductor to (just) let them play, especially a Beethoven or Brahms symphony. I was just sort of an officiator there sometimes--I would stand there and let the music flow naturally. (And) what would I read the next day? That I’m uninvolved, a cold fish.

“In other words, I was completely misunderstood. (But) I certainly was never influenced by all that. I have to do my work. I did it the best I could, and that is certainly not why I left. If I were influenced by those gentlemen in the press, I would have left earlier.”

Mehta’s glamour, candor and love of the good life have, of course, made him an attractive target. And it doesn’t help that he rarely censors himself. At rehearsals here the other day, for instance, somebody had tacked to a bulletin board backstage an Italian magazine opened to a photo of the maestro with a scantily clad Brazilian dancer during a South American tour. Walking by, Mehta saw the photo, laughed, and said he had better ones, including one of himself, the dancer and Mehta’s wife Nancy.

Stuff like that may endear him to his fans, but it’s only fodder for his detractors. While musicians here can’t seem to say enough good things about his music-making, music critics generally talk first of the flash and the glitz. The Times’ Martin Bernheimer might have been tough on him over the years in Los Angeles, but reviewers were similarly critical, if not worse, in New York.

At the end of Mehta’s New York tenure, for instance, Newsday critic Tim Page wrapped up his 13 seasons saying, among other things, that “from this vantage point, the Mehta years seem little more than one long, loud cipher--a triumph of style over substance, of personal charisma over the art of making music.”

Mehta indicates he’s wounded less by comments like that than by inaccuracies in reporting such things as his recording history. He ticks off recent recordings--18 of them last year alone--and all the ones coming up in Berlin, Vienna, Israel and elsewhere. He says the press never forgave him for the lack of recordings during a three-year period in the mid-’80s: “They still say no record company wants to touch me. It’s not true. I’ve been refusing recordings. . . . Should I take out (an) ad?”

Packed subscription audiences at the Music Center earlier this month were effusive, with heavy applause and standing ovations for Bruckner, Berg and violinist Midori, and Mehta indicates that, too, was a welcome change from New York. Yes, his last two seasons there he played to few empty seats, but put it in context: “They’re an extremely faithful group. I wouldn’t say they are the most enthusiastic of audiences, but they are there. They turn up.”

Given his “Star Wars” and Frank Zappa concerts here and a production of “Tosca” next year in Rome that will take place around the clock all over the city, Mehta is asked why he didn’t do more such unconventional programming in New York.

New York turned out to be much more conservative than anything he experienced in Los Angeles, Mehta replies. Talking about assorted “political pressures” there, he points to a “sort of self-destructive attitude toward their institutions. It’s a constant fight against people trying to put you down, whether you’re an artistic organization or a university or a sports team. I’ve never read such drastic newspaper articles about any sports team as they write about their own. In Chicago, they die for their teams. In New York, (if) they lose two games, they are the worst in the world.”

Looking just at the New York Philharmonic, and not the entire social fabric of the city, does Mehta think he was correct in the ‘60s when he warned about the city chewing up its conductors? “They say it was the same with my two predecessors,” Mehta shrugs, “but I can only talk about myself. I don’t know about (his predecessors Pierre Boulez or Leonard Bernstein). I never even asked the musicians.”

Let the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s executive vice president and managing director Ernest Fleischmann answer that one: “It’s happened to other conductors in New York. The prime example is Pierre Boulez, somebody else who this orchestra worships, (who) just didn’t work in New York. And it took a long time for Leonard Bernstein to be acknowledged by the press and everybody in New York for the extraordinary artist that he was.

“They virtually killed Sir John Barbirolli and Dimitri Mitropoulos, who were both wonderful conductors and enjoyed enormous acclaim and success elsewhere. New York for a long time was a kind of conductor’s graveyard. They’re on a honeymoon with Kurt Masur for the moment.”

So why shouldn’t Mehta be happy to be home? “Coming back to Los Angeles for three days in the middle of a busy schedule was like having a 10-minute afternoon sleep,” he says. “It just rejuvenated me.”

His musical roots, too, are here. Born into a musical family in Bombay and trained in Vienna, Mehta first conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in January, 1961. When he took over the orchestra as music director at the start of the 1962-63 season, he was only 26. It is with the musicians here, he says matter-of-factly, “that I learned my profession.”

Mehta led the Los Angeles Philharmonic--and, for several seasons, the Montreal Symphony as well--until his departure for New York. When he first told his musicians here that he was leaving Los Angeles, he said he was doing so “with an extremely heavy heart.” The news was not particularly welcome either, remembers oboist David Weiss. “We were all down. It was not a bright day when he announced he was leaving.”

Weiss was backstage taking photographs after Mehta’s first concert here this month, and there were several other orchestra members waiting in line to congratulate the conductor. Yet nearly half the orchestra is new to him. “He noticed the changes,” says trumpet player Thomas Stevens, who remembers the orchestra playing “Happy Birthday” to Mehta on his 30th birthday. “It’s not his orchestra anymore.”

It’s been more than 20 years, after all, since a Time magazine cover story spoke of Mehta exerting “the near-hypnotic spell of a gregarious, cultivated Gypsy . . . (and) the appeal of a matinee idol,” but the years sit well with him. He remains charismatic onstage and off, and the main signs of age are a graying at the temples and a look of utter exhaustion as he wipes his face and takes curtain calls following 80 minutes of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.

Yet give him some time, and the energy is back. At a post-concert dinner at Spago on opening night, he is talking Israeli politics and London restaurants with Fleischmann, long-time friend Louis Jourdan and other guests. He is seated between his wife and mother, and his exchanges with his father Mehli Mehta (founder of the Bombay Symphony and today music director and conductor of the American Youth Symphony), include conversation about grandchildren as well as music and musicians.

Now he is middle-aged, aware that some of the Philharmonic musicians weren’t even born yet when he took over the orchestra. He even has to search for a word to describe the young musicians, and finally comes up with “rookies. They’re little rookies. Some of them are so young they just got out of kindergarten. But they’re good players.”

Mehta clearly loves the limelight, but he also appears to enjoy his seniority. He exhibited near-parental pleasure at the warm reception to Midori’s performance here. And questions about another Mehta protege, Maxim Vengerov (a 17-year-old Russian violinist he will bring to Los Angeles next spring), elicit story after story of the young man’s achievements.

Remembering his own early years, Mehta has often said he and the Los Angeles Philharmonic matured together. “I still feel that some of the musicians that were in the Los Angeles Philharmonic when I first took over are the finest that I ever worked with,” he says, naming every one of the section leaders and soloists he is referring to. “I was extremely fortunate as a young conductor with practically no repertoire because I did practically everything for the first time here or in Montreal.”

What next for Mehta? Where does he expect to make his next long-term commitment? He doesn’t know, he replies: “One shouldn’t know the future. I didn’t know I’d be 13 years in New York.”

All he knows for certain is that he does not want to accept another music directorship for a while. He is aware that the job requires a fairly sizable chunk of time in one place, and says that is not what he wants to do right now. While conceding he doesn’t know “how long I can last without having another music directorship in Europe,” he says he doesn’t want one in North America. “That’s for sure. I have made music in North America for 30 years.”

Besides, his dance card is full. In addition to performing and recording with the Los Angeles Philharmonic next month, he’ll be conducting in Vienna, Munich and Leipzig later in January. (He promised Masur, who heads the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, that he would play there “even before he was asked to be my successor (in New York).”) Coming up next season will be his 1,500th concert with the Israel Philharmonic, and he’s been conducting in both Berlin and Vienna annually for decades.

Consider his February schedule: He takes the Israel Philharmonic to the Canary Islands for a week, after which he joins a handful of friends for an 8-day expedition through southern Venezuela. Then he moves on to guest at the Chicago Symphony for two weeks, performing not just Mahler’s Third Symphony but also a Lukas Foss world premiere.

In May, he takes the Israel Philharmonic to Toledo, Spain, with friends Placido Domingo and Isaac Stern to mark 500 years since Spain’s expulsion of the Jews. He toured with the orchestra three times this year alone. (They earn double-pay on tour, he says, a boon to musicians who earn just one-fourth what U.S. musicians earn.) He’s planning a sabbatical from the Israeli orchestra in 1993-94, but meanwhile jokes of heading off with them on a 12-month tour.

Mehta also forecasts more opera than ever before. He’s already considering or committed to opera companies all over Europe, saying, “I’ve always loved conducting opera. Until now, I had two orchestras under my umbrella and couldn’t do as much opera as I wanted.”

Coming up next year, in fact, are two productions of “Tosca”--the peripatetic production in Rome in July as well as a second that will open the Covent Garden season in London in September with Luciano Pavarotti. Mehta calls Florence his “operatic home,” and two years ago began a Mozart cycle there with director Jonathan Miller. Due next is “The Marriage of Figaro,” as well as more opera recordings in Florence and elsewhere.

Back in the United States, Mehta will return to New York in the 1992-93 season to conduct the world premiere of a Messiaen symphony commissioned for the orchestra’s 150th anniversary. He will also start a “Ring” cycle with the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1993 which continues through 1996.

He will, of course, also be visiting Los Angeles from time to time. “The combination of coming back to my former colleagues and being home at the same time is wonderful,” Mehta says. “I wouldn’t do it otherwise. I’m a free bird now. I do what I want.”