Zubin Mehta: A Celebration

We may live in an era when major orchestras are losing their regional identities and sounding more and more alike, but there is still the Israel Philharmonic. Its players are famed for their argumentative rehearsal style, their aggressive scrappiness, their undilutable passions and ferocious loyalties. They do not appear to be a model society built upon courtly individuals giving up their personalities for a common good; they both compete and egg one another on. This is not so much a collective of complaisant artists in a peaceable kingdom as a musical army on a mission.

I am not sure what a steady diet of this orchestra would be like, but to hear it on occasion is always bracing. The latest occasion was Thursday night at UCLA where the orchestra’s bold style was plainly evident, and so were its famed loyalties. The concert was a celebration of Zubin Mehta’s 30th anniversary conducting the orchestra. Isaac Stern, whose association with the orchestra goes back to 1949, was the soloist.

The evening was a benefit for the orchestra and a large part of the audience that filled Royce Hall were Hollywood elite in black-tie who had donated thousands of dollars to attend a post-concert dinner. Stern, who like Mehta had donated his services, made a further plea for money for an instrument fund the orchestra has named after Mehta, and summed up the band perfectly with the joke about that fact that two Jews can never agree upon anything except how much a third should give.

One of the most distinguishing features of the Israel Philharmonic is the brilliantly soloistic nature of many of the players. About half of them now are recent emigres from the former Soviet Union, and many are striking soloists. And since the big piece of the evening was Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” which is nothing if not a full-blown display piece, the results were extraordinary. Ilia Konovalov, the 22-year-old Siberian concertmaster, played Scheherazade’s violin solos with a lavish, show-stopping virtuosity. But principal cello, flute, clarinet and oboe were not about to be outdone.

It was also obvious why Mehta has been appointed music director for life. He is exactly what the Israel Philharmonic needs. He gives the players all the room to be their passionate pushy selves when that is appropriate. But then he marshals their forces and exploits their collective power. It has taken some years for this approach to really work--Mehta’s recording of “Scheherazade” with the Israel Philharmonic made a dozen years ago is slower, more ponderous and not nearly as much fun as Thursday’s performance.

A downside to Israel Philharmonic’s fractious nature, however, can be a certain intolerance. In an interview in the program book, Mehta said that his greatest regret in his 30 years with the orchestra has been his inability to change the minds of musicians and audience about contemporary music. But he hasn’t given up trying, and he opened the program with the Symphony No. 1 by Josef Tal, the dean of Israeli composers who turns 90 in September. A noted musicologist and the founder, in 1961, of the Israel Center for Electronic Music, Tal has produced a large body of work in all genres that often combines patriotic Hebrew themes with Modernist musical techniques.

In his first symphony, a 14-minute one-movement score from the early ‘50s, an ancient Jewish-Persian lamentation is fractured, and each little bit of it seems to generate something different, here a lovely Middle Eastern viola solo with harp and glassy string accompaniment, there noisy martial music. It is too brief to settle into any one thing, although the larger shape moves from lamentation to celebration, and it is an interesting exercise in combining Modernist and folk elements in a way that doesn’t sound even faintly reminiscent of Bartok. Like it or not, the orchestra gave a committed, forceful performance.

In between the symphonic exotica, Stern played Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3. The violinist, who will be 80 this year, has recently undergone successful surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. He is at his career’s end as a performer, but it is possible to overlook thin tone and unreliable intonation and hear a still marvelous musician at work. There was nothing gingerly about his Mozart, and the aggressive spirit of the Israeli players seemed to spur him on.

Mehta is legendary among players as an accompanist of near psychic responsiveness. But something more impressive than that was at work here. He simply put his incredibly fast reflexes at the service of the soloist. Conducting without a score, he kept his eyes on Stern’s bow and followed every tiny inflection. It was an amusing object lesson for the orchestra--though hardly likely to take--in gracious collegiality.