Mehta Takes Verdi’s Fury in Hand

The programs for Zubin Mehta’s annual December return to the Los Angeles Philharmonic hint at one-upmanship this year. Last week, he conducted Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” an Esa-Pekka Salonen specialty and brilliant centerpiece of the orchestra’s celebrated Stravinsky festival earlier in the year. Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mehta turned to Verdi’s Requiem. Mark Elder’s generously expressive and spectacular performance of the Requiem with the Philharmonic was the highlight of 2000, Salonen’s sabbatical year.

Yet, “Rite” and Requiem have long been Mehta specialties. And although nearly 20 years have passed since he was Philharmonic music director, the chemistry between Mehta and his former orchestra remains. The Requiem begins with a very quiet, very simple descending line in the cellos. And Mehta’s stamp was instantly apparent in the taut, tense stillness of those couple seconds. For some conductors, this opening is a brief meditation, a sort of deep musical breath. Mehta, however, has us hold our breaths, as if that faint sound were a bomb falling in the air, about to explode.

And explode it certainly did over the 80-minute course of Verdi’s great drama of death and its aftermath. It is possible to find spiritual sustenance in this multifaceted score, but that did not seem to be on Mehta’s mind. He has always had an incisive, dramatic touch, and he seems to have honed his dramatic skills all the more in his current job as music director of the Bavarian State Opera.

For Mehta, then, this Requiem was an alternatively thrilling, terrible, majestic, magnificent, violent, and always theatrical, confrontation with death. You might think that with nerves still as raw as they are after the Sept. 11 tragedy, audiences would now like a little more consolation. Instead, Mehta offered defiance, and it not only dominated but altogether decimated all other emotions. At the end of the performance, the audience burst into rhythmic clapping. Standing ovations are common at the Music Center; this response was something rare and authentic.

Perhaps what proved most extraordinary was that everyone on stage seemed of one purpose. Mehta conducted without score and without a sense of letup. The Philharmonic played as if all the players were on the edge of their seats. It was surprising at first that Mehta overlooked opportunities for spectacle, such as placing the trumpets around the theater. Instead, he trusted the music to create an operatic impact. The Dies Irae was arresting not only for its breathtaking sound but also for the emphasis on syncopated accents that brought this close to the realm of Stravinsky. And there was the wonderful surprise of the Sanctus as rousing as a chorus in “Falstaff.”

Mehta has always loved to treat the Philharmonic as a high-powered musical sports car that he can take out for a hard drive, and it seems to love be driven fast around hairpin turns. On this occasion, he got to take the Master Chorale, its singing as alert as I have ever heard it, on that ride as well. And he chose a soloist who would not slow him down.

Soprano Fiorenza Cedolins has a flutey, spinning vibrato that produces a fussy sound in slow, high passages, and she swoops, but she burst forth in the Libera Me with an electrifying temperament. Dolora Zajick was the riveting mezzo-soprano. Stuart Neill does not have the rounded Italianate sound of the typical Verdi tenor, but he has the vocal range of expression of a modern singer, and Mehta exploited that fully. David Pittsinger, a last-minute substitution, was the powerful and stirring bass.

This may not be traditionally the season for expressions of anger and defiance, but this has been an angry year, and the Philharmonic’s rousing, fist-raising commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Verdi’s death, however peculiar, is not just appropriate but altogether inspiring.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic repeats Verdi’s Requiem today, 8 p.m., $12-$78, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. (323) 365-3500.