The Pit and the Podium : Zubin Mehta, who turns 60 Monday with a celebration at the Music Center, is at a crossroads, and considering a change in direction.

The maestro is running late, which is not unusual.

It is after 10 a.m. on a brisk, bright Thursday, and Zubin Mehta has yet to take in the two newspapers encased in plastic hanging from the knob of his hotel suite’s door. Though he has hurriedly dressed in a long-sleeved, gray, collared sweater and dark corduroy pants, he remains unshaven.

He must rush to the Lyric Opera House because he needs to help rehearse a replacement singer for Saturday night’s “Gotterdammerung.” The mercurial Chicago weather--which has kept packed audiences coughing and sniffing--also has felled Marjana Lipovsek, who sang Fricka in “Die Walkure” and was scheduled to sing Waltraute. She and her sore throat have departed, unable to meet the demands of the grand finale of Wagner’s epic, four-opera Ring Cycle.

Mehta has been conducting the entire cycle here for three weeks--each week a grueling schedule of four different five- and six-hour concerts, coaxing a big Germanic sound out of the Lyric Orchestra, which is more accustomed to the lighter style and short notes of Italian opera. It is a first for him.

The phone rings. Daniel Barenboim, an old friend and music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is on the line from Berlin. He is about to conduct his own Ring Cycle. He too has the flu. “Oh my God. You sound terrible. Oy vey iz mir,” Mehta sympathizes.

Barenboim wants Mehta to come to Germany to fill in once he finishes at the Lyric. “I can’t help you! I can’t help you!” Mehta cries, though clearly the refusal causes anguish.

He had a trip to Jordan planned, but it has just been canceled. The fax from a Jordanian dignitary to the Italian impresario who arranged the engagement lies on the coffee table. He ponders Barenboim’s plea. “Next week,” he muses, “I have six days off.”

*

To most humans, such a topsy-turvy life would be spectacularly nerve-racking. But this is the slow lane for Mehta, the Bombay-born former music director of the Montreal, Los Angeles and New York philharmonics, who has adroitly maneuvered through a long career from wunderkind to eminence grise, attracting criticism for his flamboyance while inspiring affection for the way he wields both his baton and the political power of his fame.

Now he is down to one orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, while most Jet Age conductors juggle two. And he just spent three months actually living in one place, even if it was the 43rd floor of the Four Seasons Hotel here, and not his home in Brentwood.

Mehta’s wavy hair is flecked with gray these days. His build is portly enough that it’s doubtful he’ll pose nude in a sauna, as he once did for Paris Match, or bare-chested, standing on his head, as he did for the New York Times Magazine in 1978.

On Monday, he turns 60, a birthday he will be celebrating at the Music Center with a joint concert by the two orchestras he says are closest to his heart, the Los Angeles and Israel philharmonics. Proceeds will benefit their pension funds. His dear friends, celebrated violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman (who calls Mehta “my blood brother”), and Barenboim, a pianist, will also play (and in the case of Barenboim, conduct. The concert, the final stop on the IPO’s current U.S. tour, includes works by Beethoven, Ravel, Weber and Mozart, and most likely a few birthday surprises.

To his younger brother, Zarin, it is the perfect party: “He’s going to conduct. That’s what life is all about.”

But after the celebration, and a guest-conducting stint with the Los Angeles Philharmonic later that week (with Zukerman again soloing), Mehta has some decisions to make, big decisions. Within a few years, he says, he may be done with symphony orchestras, except for some guest conducting. He is weighing giving himself over totally to his new plunge into opera.

In 1998, he will assume the music directorship of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Of philharmonics, he says: “That’s out of my system. . . . I don’t want to be music director of any orchestra. Israel? That’s something I do for my heart. But I will have to see. I will be spending five months in Munich. I haven’t decided.”

It would not be an easy break. He has conducted the Israel Philharmonic since 1961, becoming music director in 1968. In 1981, the orchestra, a musicians’ cooperative, extended the appointment for life.

During the 1967 Israeli-Arab Six-Day War, Mehta left a Metropolitan Opera tour and boarded the last plane to Israel before the closure of the Tel Aviv airport. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he conducted special concerts dedicated to the soldiers in the field.

He has lived with fears of terrorism during Israel Philharmonic tours abroad. “I remember my first viola sat onstage with a pistol in his pocket. To shoot back,” Mehta says. “That was our way of doing things until a few years ago. On every tour, we had bomb threats. Sometimes we told the orchestra, sometimes we didn’t.”

In 1972, when news broke of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mehta and the orchestra were playing in Brazil, where, Mehta notes, some of “these Nazi kooks” have settled.

“We were 125 people, very far from home,” he says, and very frightened. “But I must tell you,” he adds, “they played Mahler’s First Symphony, the victory of the spirit. It was never so interpreted. ‘Just try to touch us.’ That’s what they were saying.”

Bound to the musicians and the nation by these experiences, Mehta has developed a soul as Jewish as it is Indian. He sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish in the same way he spices his food with the tiny hot peppers of his homeland. His contract with the Israel Philharmonic, he explains, is “a mazel and a brucha--just a handshake.”

He does have some unfinished business with the orchestra. He would like to take it on tour to an Arab land, as he took the musicians to Germany in 1971 (they played Mahler’s First there, too).

The undone journey to Jordan was Step 1 in his plan. He would conduct the Jordanian national orchestra in “a little classical program” to raise funds for one of Queen Noor’s pet charities to help disabled children. That could pave the way for Israel’s musicians.

After the spate of Hamas suicide bombings and the commensurate rise in Mideast tension, all parties concluded that “it seems premature” for the Israel Philharmonic music director to go to Jordan, Mehta says.

The letter on his table suggests waiting “until, as you say, ‘the time is right.’ ”

Mehta sighs. “They’re not saying no. Nobody said no.” King Hussein is recovering from surgery in Los Angeles, the letter says. “If the king’s not at the concert, it means nothing, anyway,” Mehta says. “I told them a week in September I could come.”

He is frustrated. The Israeli orchestra “should have been in Egypt already,” he says. “There’s peace since 1978. I’m telling you, it’s difficult.”

He did make one trip in January that he’d thought he’d never make--to South Africa, to Durban, “because it’s the Indian city, not to Johannesburg.”

He had refused previous invitations to conduct there because of apartheid, which ostracized Indians as well as blacks. “For the Indians to see an Indian onstage, to see a standing ovation by a white audience for an Indian,” Mehta says, “for this it was worth it.”

He went to a tea given by the mayor of Pietermaritzburg, the town where Mohandas Gandhi was thrown off a train for having the nerve to sit in a car reserved for whites. The mayor told him this was his last official function, that his successor was an Indian. Mehta was delighted.

He has long been fond of making political points. He goose-stepped off a Leningrad stage during the Soviet era and stayed away from Greece while the colonels were in power. He refused to lead the Israel Philharmonic in Germany’s national anthem--a traditional courtesy at the Berlin Festival--because it remains “Deutschland Uber Alles.” He conducted Mozart’s “Requiem” in the bombed-out shell of Sarajevo’s National Library in 1994.

Also that year, he introduced the work of Richard Strauss to Israeli audiences. Strauss had been, by unwritten covenant, a banned composer in the Jewish state because of his position as head of music for Germany during Hitler’s reign.

But Strauss, Mehta pointed out in public debates, also later fell from favor after writing operas with a Jewish librettist and taking themes from Greek mythology rather than German culture.

“We just said now is the time,” Mehta says, and the musicians played “Don Quixote” “like it’s written for them.”

Richard Wagner, the composer whose Ring Cycle has obsessed him of late, is a different story. Wagner’s music was piped over speakers in the concentration camps.

In 1981, Mehta announced to an audience in Tel Aviv that the encore would be from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Fistfights broke out in the auditorium. Then, in 1992, though the musicians had voted to play Wagner’s music as part of a regular program, a survey of orchestra subscribers showed that 30% opposed hearing the composer’s work under any circumstances. The idea was dropped.

“Too many people are really hurt emotionally,” Mehta says. “There are many people with numbers on their arms. They don’t want to be reminded of it. You can’t argue with that.”

He thinks music lovers understand why he wants to add Wagner to the orchestra’s repertoire. “But non-music people, people from the outside, will scream. It’s the last vestige of feeling against Germany,” he says. “And it will take another generation.”

He doubts he will ever conduct Wagner in Israel, “especially not Ring Cycles.” He appears faintly alarmed at such a thought, eyes widening, brow rising. “The text is too . . . the class differences hit a Jewish person. The gods, the Nibelungs, the giants.” And he dismisses the notion of the Israeli orchestra playing Wagner on tour. “That,” he says, “would be hypocritical.”

Mehta is steeped, though, in the Germanic tradition. He left India, where he assisted in his father’s Bombay Symphony, to enter Vienna’s Academy of Music at the age of 18. The first day, he attended a performance by the Vienna Philharmonic. He listened and watched conductors Karl Boehm, Herbert von Karajan, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber, Fritz Reiner.

In 1961, he took the reins of the Montreal Symphony. In 1962, Georg Solti quit the Los Angeles Philharmonic after the board hired Mehta as associate director without consulting him. Mehta, who says he understands why Solti was so furious, got the top job. He was 25.

Over the next 16 years, “the Los Angeles Philharmonic and I came of age together,” Mehta says. Critics thought Mehta allowed too much adoration: a larger-than-life portrait in the Music Center, ushers dressed in Indian garb. But when Mehta left, even his detractors said he’d led a provincial orchestra to world-class status.

Mehta went on to 13 seasons with the New York Philharmonic, where he received similarly mixed reviews. Mehta says he isn’t bitter about his press, but Zukerman is happy to be bitter for him: “I’m getting sick of it. I don’t read the papers anymore.

“Zubin is that kind of incredible magnet. It can actually interfere with one’s listening process to some extent. But that’s superficial.”

Since leaving his post in New York, Mehta has had more time to indulge his longtime fascination with opera in Rome, Florence and Vienna. For four years, he explored Wagner’s Ring operas at the Lyric, conducting one each year. The effort culminated in the complete cycle last month.

“Zubin is more extraordinary in some ways in the pit than on the stage,” Zukerman says. “Because he is theatrical, it seemingly lends itself better to his style.”

An opera orchestra “is not just a background for what’s going on onstage,” Mehta says. “The movement flows from the pit to the stage to the pit. Apart from playing the notes, you have to make theater of this. When you read the text, it really helps. Remember, they can’t see the stage.”

And he is working with great singers as well as instrumentalists. “They have their own ideas, too.”

During a rehearsal here, Mehta says, one singer stopped and said to him: “Oh, maestro, I’m sorry I wasn’t following you.”

But, Mehta says, “nobody follows.” And so he says he responded: “No, don’t be sorry. I want us to breathe together.”

* Zubin Mehta Birthday Celebration concert, Los Angeles Philharmonic / Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Monday, 7 p.m. $25-$150. (213) 972-0737. Mehta conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Thursday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2:30 p.m. $6-$58. (213) 850-2000.