Loading ...LAST year had some significant milestones for Zubin Mehta. The Mumbai-born maestro turned 70, as did the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which he has led since 1969. His birthday was marked with a commemorative reissue of his recordings, a German-language autobiography and gala concerts; the IPO’s with an anniversary concert series featuring such guests as Valery Gergiev, Evgeny Kissin, Maxim Vengerov and Kurt Masur.
Mehta has reduced his workload from three jobs to two. He is music director at the IPO and Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Italy, but has stepped down from the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. His deep engagement with music, however, is undimmed.
“My appetite and love for it is such that every concert is a first performance, especially with the orchestras I conduct,” he says on the phone from Tel Aviv, during the IPO’s anniversary concerts last month. “If I don’t find the same enthusiasm in the orchestra, I just don’t go there.”
He began the new year in the best possible style for a maestro: conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Concert from the famous Musikverein. A CD and DVD of the concert will be released here on January 20.
The concert is a festive bonbon, built around the music of the Viennese waltz king Johann Strauss and his extended family. Broadcast around the world - it was screened live on SBS - it has helped evangelise the Vienna Phil’s very particular style of music.
“The fact that the concert is the music of the Strauss family has become a tradition for over 50 years now,” says Mehta, who has now conducted four New Year’s Concerts. “It has become, for music-lovers around the world, a ritual to welcome the year. No orchestra plays Strauss like them: it is unmistakably their style.”
Mehta’s origins are not in the middle European heartland. Born in Mumbai to a Parsi family, he was steeped in Western classical music from a young age: his father Mehli Mehta was a violinist and the founder of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra.
A one-time medical student and a cricket tragic - the biggest news on the day we speak is Shane Warne’s retirement - he abandoned medicine and in 1954 landed in Europe to begin his training as a conductor.
Vienna was a culture shock: the German language and freezing winters were foreign to him. Mehta relates an amusing tale of how, one winter, he put an electric heater under his bedclothes and set the eiderdown alight.
But he had arrived in one of the great centres of music, and took up studies with the Hungarian conductor Hans Swarowsky, also a mentor to Claudio Abbado. Within a few years, he made his conducting debut with the Vienna Philharmonic by stepping in for Eugene Ormandy, with a program of Stravinsky and Richard Strauss.
At the time, Mehta was the youngest conductor to front the orchestra. Recalling the experience, the eloquent Mehta momentarily falters. “Having sort of grown up in Vienna, it was doubly … the awe of it was … When one is young, one has more guts than otherwise,” he says. “I knew the orchestra from having listened from standing-room sections for seven years before that. I venerated the Vienna Philharmonic. I was pretty scared.”
Sydney audiences recently had the opportunity to hear the Viennese orchestra: the VPO made its first tour to Australia last year and gave concerts at the Sydney Opera House, with Gergiev conducting. The clarity and power of its playing, and palette of sounds it produced, made its appearance one of the highlights of the musical year.
With sublime music comes historical baggage: anti-Semitism, Nazi musicians, and a refusal to admit women players until a decade ago. Even the joyous New Year’s concert has its origins in grim times. The first was on December 31, 1939, when the orchestra’s independence was threatened by the Third Reich: the all-Strauss program was a way of asserting the orchestra’s Austrian nationality.
Even today, the Vienna Phil adheres rigidly to its musical traditions and identity. Mehta says other orchestras can give fine performances of Mahler and Bruckner, for example, but with Johann Strauss there is an “unmistakable stamp”.
“One has to be very well versed in the style, because the music of Johann Strauss is full of traditions; traditions that have accumulated from the time he used to play and conduct,” Mehta says. “That’s been passed down from musician to musician. And without the knowledge and instinct of that style, it would be very difficult to conduct this orchestra.”
He makes a comparison with the resident orchestra at the new Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain. Mehta conducted the orchestra in its inaugural season last year; the young musicians, average age in the early 30s, were picked by Lorin Maazel.
“They are from 25 different countries,” Mehta says. “And it is the complete opposite of the Vienna Philharmonic, who are 80 per cent from Vienna.”
Those who saw the SBS broadcast of the New Year’s Concert on January 2 or in other years will be familiar with the format: the golden, flower-bedecked interior of the Grosser Saal, the silky, glide-across-the-floor rhythm of the waltz. Mehta’s program included the Einzugs-Galopp by Johann Strauss I, Zivio! by his son Johann Strauss II, and Delirien by Johann Strauss II’s brother Josef. There were the obligatory encores: the Blue Danube waltz, and Radetzky-Marsch.
“This is not considered light music by the orchestra,” Mehta insists. “They regard it as important as Mozart. They play, of course, with the joviality that it demands, but it is sacred to them.”
In his almost five-decade career, Mehta has worked with many of the world’s great orchestras: he has been music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic among other roles. He made his debut with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam as recently as 2005. His preference, however, is to work with orchestras he knows, rather than rushing to fill his dance card. “With the orchestras I conduct, I am able to renew my enthusiasm, and they give it back to me,” he says. “I create an ideal situation for myself.”
Loading ...
