Magical Combo: Mehta, Mahler

These are eventful times for Zubin Mehta. A fall season spent in Beijing, conducting “Turandot” in the Forbidden City; in Munich, firing the popular soprano Cheryl Studer as one of his first acts as the new music director of Bavarian Opera; in Santa Monica, appearing at the Susan McDougal trial.

On Thursday, he was back at the Music Center to begin a two-week engagement with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Greeted by sustained applause from a large audience, Mehta walked on stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion erect, imperious, cocky. Once the crowd finally began to quiet, a loudly exclaimed “My baby!” came from his father in the audience.

Suddenly, he was human again. And human he remained for the next hour and a half in a riveting performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

This last completed score by Mahler has a way of breaking down defenses. We may go too far in the morbid interpretation of it as a chronicle of the composer’s own mortality. He died of a heart infection in 1911, the year of the symphony, shortly before his 51st birthday.

But there is an inescapable spiritual depth to the outer movements and a manic vibrancy in the two inner ones that can readily lead to such interpretations, as the Philharmonic’s own history with the Ninth shows. John Barbirolli conducted the orchestra’s first performance of it in 1969 as overwhelming valedictory; he was a year from his own death. Carlo Maria Giulini’s performance in 1975 was so poignant that it led to widespread rumors that the conductor was dying of cancer, hardly true in the case of a figure who went on to become the orchestra’s music director.

There is also the other extreme. For instance, Pierre Boulez, who conducted the Ninth here in 1989, approaches it abstractly, as an important landmark in the beginning of musical modernism.

And now there is Mehta, who is both bold and literal at the same time. He asks that everything written in the score, every detailed dynamic and expressive marking be presented faithfully, dramatically, in your face--but he digs no deeper. If the playing is magnificent, if a ferocious control is maintained throughout, he seems satisfied that the music will suggest the rest. Introspection is the audience’s work.

Though a faithful Mahlerian, Mehta has waited on the Ninth, never before conducting it with the Philharmonic. He may have done well to wait, given the surprising but effective even keel on which he kept this turbulent symphony.

Mehta does produce the sharpest possible rhythmic incision in the second movement, a fanciful landler, and generates the requisite tumult in the nightmarish Rondo Burlesque, and he is not one to ignore a frenzied or earth-shattering climax such as those presented to him in the first movement. But Mehta established a sense of poise at the beginning and returned to it often, maintaining it with downright spectacular intensity in the final Adagio.

Mostly this was a performance about sound, sound as sculpted time, sound as frozen architecture, sound as a vast stage on which a life can be portrayed, sound of startling brilliance and immediacy. A single bassoon could grab a listener by the lapels. The brass were fresh, in your face, dazzling.

But it was the strings, and the strings in the Adagio above all, that will be, I think, remembered. Mehta divides the violins on either side of the stage, less for contrapuntal interest than to produce a wide, hall-filling effect. The lower strings in the center resonate off the back wall, creating a deeply supported bass.

Mehta can be a sectional conductor, but not in the Adagio, which was very slow and also very taut. The strings, sometimes just an instrument or two, sometimes a rich-as-thick-cream full complement, never, for nearly half an hour lost the sense of tension, of line. There was no milking of expression, no sense of life or death, no tears, no heartbreak. Still the music making was rapt and attentive, and Mahler’s intentions were crystal-clear.

* Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, tonight at 8, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $9-$65, (323) 850-2000.