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Review: Zubin Mehta and Israel Philharmonic Orchestra are not a good fit in the smallish Wallis

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If there is one trait that is likely to define Zubin Mehta when all is said and done, it’s durability. He holds the record for the longest regime as music director of the New York Philharmonic and held the same distinction at the Los Angeles Philharmonic until Esa-Pekka Salonen surpassed him by one year.

And neither of these terms come close to Mehta’s tenure at the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, where he has presided over one of the most fractious ensembles on Earth since 1977 as music director (and before that as music advisor from 1969).

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So the Mehta-Israel team is, to say the least, a familiar brand, and it came calling again to Los Angeles this week as part of a U.S. tour. There were, though, a couple of twists.

This time, Mehta and the orchestra performed not at the usual large culture temples but in the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Granted, they were originally supposed to appear in Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday night, but that concert was canceled and the orchestra played an abbreviated benefit concert at the Wallis instead. On Wednesday, the orchestra played a full program at the Wallis much like the originally scheduled Disney Hall date, with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony replacing Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony.

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This was the first time the relatively tiny 500-seat Wallis had hosted a big symphony orchestra, and it seemed like a mismatch. From the American and Israeli national anthems onward, the sound from the crowded stage was congested, opaque, lacking in adequate reverberation and bass, and when the timpani went at it, its boom blotted out almost everything else.

To be fair, it’s questionable if Disney Hall would have been able to clarify things much, for when I heard Mehta and Israel there in 2007, the sound was similarly thick-set, homogenous, visceral. This is the Mehta sound — it has been since his years in Los Angeles, albeit somewhat mellower now — and it’s different from those that other conductors have produced from the chameleonic orchestra.

Mehta’s rendition of the “Eroica” Symphony was often weighed down by heavy textures and deliberate tempos, but every now and then, he would coax the performance to another level with a carefully graded, cannily detonated climax in the second movement or a sharply executed fugue in the finale. As in the past, Mehta could get the orchestra to execute a Viennese lilt in passages of Ravel’s “La Valse,” drawn-out near the breaking point, and he still whips up a bracingly brutal fury toward the end.

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The other new twist was the adventurous inclusion of “Journey to the End of the Millennium” by Josef Bardanashvili, the Georgian-born composer who now lives in Israel. Drawing upon passages from an opera of the same name, this symphonic poem broiled and swirled in an epic, apocalyptic mood for nearly 22 minutes, the Hebraic element occasionally present in the pounding drums or a solo violin episode. It would be nice to explore it again — preferably in a bigger hall.

A graceful, autumnal-sounding Mozart Overture to “The Marriage of Figaro” finished off the night.

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