Mehta Deftly Leads Israel Philharmonic

Zubin Mehta led the Israel Philharmonic in a conventional program of Mozart, Beethoven and Richard Strauss Thursday evening at the Civic Theatre. Since the orchestra’s current 11-city North American tour--with just this one stop in Southern California--celebrates the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, hearing a piece by an Israeli composer would have been both welcome and congruent. But even standard fare is bracing under the authoritative baton of the Philharmonic’s music director.

The orchestra gave Strauss’ tone poem “Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche” an incisive, electric performance that elevated the work’s bumptious comedy to the sublime. In a score that distributes bravura solo riffs to nearly every section, not so much as a grace note was slighted. As Haydn said of his London orchestra, this ensemble is “truly an army of generals.”

Mehta’s pumped-up interpretation of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, however, proved less winning. Gift-wrapping the “Jupiter” in a blanket of lush string sound that nearly obliterated the winds neutralized Mozart’s best effects and characteristic timbre, and Mehta’s pace was more ponderous than pliant. It was as if he had exchanged Mozart’s gilded rococo coach for a plush touring car.

Mehta delivered a genuinely heroic Beethoven Third Symphony, albeit a heroism of the cooler Apollonian variety. His evenly paced approach stressed the symphony’s expansive architecture and transparent voicing rather than its revolutionary fervor, but not at the expense of the work’s emotional impact. In particular, Mehta’s second-movement cortege was deft and moving.

In this program at least, the Israel Philharmonic’s big, glossy string-dominated timbre sounded like an old-fashioned American orchestra of the Szell-Ormandy mode.