Zubin Mehta's heady days as Los Angeles Philharmonic music director

By Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic

Dec. 8, 2012 12 AM PT

Bombay born and Vienna trained, debonair enough to impress Hollywood and with a swashbuckling podium style, Zubin Mehta conducted his first concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic 50 years ago. On Nov. 15, 1962, he was 26, the youngest music director in the orchestra’s history, but to observers inside the Philharmonic Auditorium, Mehta came off as unshakably self-confident and strikingly capable. In six more years he would make the cover of Time magazine, an extraordinary feat for a conductor of any age.

Thursday night, Mehta and the L.A. Phil will celebrate that anniversary by re-creating the program of Mozart, Hindemith and Dvorák that marked the beginning of his 16 seasons with the orchestra. During those often freewheeling and certainly controversial years, the L.A. Phil rose to a position of international prominence it had never before known. The orchestra’s reputation for being a proudly visionary institution begins here.

Fifty years on, including a rocky 13 seasons at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, Mehta is mostly found overseas. He is known for his loyalty. He has headed the Israel Philharmonic since 1977 and holds the title music director for life. He has been chief conductor of the Maggio Musicale in Florence since 1985.

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But he remains an Angeleno. Late last summer, in a rare two full weeks at his Brentwood home, I find a relatively relaxed Mehta, looking more fit than he has in years. He greets me a little groggily in his garden on a warm September morning by asking me to remind him why I was there.

“It’s to talk about your 50th anniversary with the L.A. Phil,” I remind him. “Isn’t it 60?” Mehta asks. “It was 1962.”

My hope was to jog his memories about his early days in L.A. Fortunately once warmed up, he becomes loquacious, theatrical, funny and willing to spill a couple of beans.

He was not inclined, however, to revisit the circumstances behind his appointment as music director.

Early in 1961, Dorothy Chandler, head of the orchestra (and wife of Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler), appointed Mehta principal guest conductor after he had made a strong impression as a dashing 23-year-old fill-in for an ailing Fritz Reiner. The orchestra had already named the dynamic Hungarian conductor Georg Solti to be its music director. But Dorothy Chandler had failed to consult Solti over her Mehta appointment, and Solti, feeling slighted, resigned in a huff.

Already smitten by Mehta’s conducting, an unfazed Dorothy Chandler engaged him to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl and then offered him the top job. His experience was limited. Los Angeles — then home to any number of great musicians including conductor Bruno Walter, violinist Jascha Heifetz and composer Igor Stravinsky — was a big and ripe plum.

“I was a young conductor without a repertoire,” Mehta explains. “I knew a lot of pieces, but I had never conducted them.” That first concert is one he ascribes to “the folly of youth” and says he frankly can’t remember how it went.

Early on a senior member of the orchestra said that seven musicians who had become dead weight had to go. George Kuyper, the orchestra’s manager, told Mehta that would be OK.

“So we gave them notice,” he recounts, “and there was such an uproar. A young conductor before he starts, how dare you fire seven people.”

Instead, they were put on probation, Mehta recalls. “And I had to make music with them every day. It took a few months, and then everything was OK.”

When Mehta began, the orchestra performed in a reconverted church while the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was under construction. Mehta opened the gleaming hall in 1964 — his soloist was Heifetz — and that ushered the orchestra into a new era. But it was a lengthy process.

Mehta describes the ensemble he inherited as not technically great. “But there were wonderful musicians, and they had a lot of experience,” he insists. “The solo chairs of this orchestra when I took over were superb musicians from whom I learned a lot.”

Mehta’s ambition for the orchestra was to create a velvety Viennese sound, and he takes particular pride in the instruments he obtained to help make that happen. He inspired, he says, the clarinetist Michele Zukovsky to change to a Viennese clarinet, which she still uses in the orchestra. “The beautiful sound she makes,” Mehta enthuses, “that’s Vienna.”

He takes responsibility for being the first to bring German trumpets, with their rotary valves and a distinct sound, to a major American orchestra. “I smuggled a mouthpiece out from Vienna,” he admits. “It was like a state secret. And then I bought the violins. Without batting an eye — I had no one to discuss it with even — I said I’m going to buy instruments.”

The orchestra had been given a bequest of $100,000 a year, so Mehta and concertmaster David Frisina went to Europe on buying sprees. Prices were a fraction of what they would be today, and the pair loaded up with classic old Italian instruments.

“Guarneris were $10,000, $12,000,” Mehta notes. He recalls buying a Stradivarius cello for $50,000.

“And who was against me? Heifetz! Heifetz told board members that the musicians would not take care of these instruments, and it’s a very bad idea.

“He was so wrong! Musicians have taken care of these instruments like they are their children. They are still in absolute top condition. And now they’re in the hands of a third generation. In other words, musicians have come and gone, but the voice is there still.”

Mehta takes great pleasure in recounting how he got the L.A. Phil a recording contract with Decca. The orchestra released three or four LPs a year for a decade. Show pieces were favored, and the sound quality was so glorious that the original LPs have become collectors’ items.

The idea had been to entice the city to underwrite the recordings, and Mehta recalls when he and Dorothy Chandler went to ask powerful Mayor Sam Yorty for funding.

“But he wanted to make a deal with her,” Mehta says, “because The Times was very critical of him, especially for all the traveling he was doing. So he asked her, in front of me, to tell The Times to stop criticizing him. ‘No more cartoons,’ he said, ‘and I’ll support the recordings.’

“And, of course, she told him to go to hell.”

The cost to record was $52 per player a session. “It’s nothing!,” Mehta remembers. “So I reached an agreement with Decca that we would pay $26 and they would pay $26.”

Oddly for someone who for a while was nicknamed “Zubie Baby,” Mehta sees himself as not being all that musically adventurous and says he often had to be encouraged to do the more flamboyant things for which he became known. His chief encourager was the irrepressible Ernest Fleischmann, whom Mehta enticed to L.A. from London in 1969.

I note how deeply Mehta seemed to have bonded with his new general manager. “We got along,” Mehta says. “And we didn’t get along. On a daily basis. There were such discussions and such arguments. But a lot of things were born out of that. Ideas that happened here first.”

Among those ambitiously venturesome notions were marathon concerts, beginning in 1970 with one of Beethoven from 10 a.m to 10 p.m. Fleischmann cooked up their famous “Star Wars” concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 1977, when the orchestra had to vacate the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the Academy Awards.

“That was by sheer chance,” Mehta recounts. “We had nothing to do.

“So we thought, ‘Let’s give a children’s concert at the Bowl.’ And Ernest said, ‘Look, every child loves “Star Wars.”’ What happened is that the children came with parents, and in the end there were 17,000 people.”

It started a phenomenon. Soon “Star Wars” concerts were given all over America, and then the world. From that one event was born the kind of movie-score event concerts that remain popular today.

“I only did it once in my life,” Mehta is quick to point out. “That concert was meant for children, and I never did that concert again.”

However much convincing Mehta may have needed for such projects, there is no question that he and Fleischmann treated the L.A. Phil as a uniquely activist organization, willing even to take political stances.

I ask Mehta about the orchestra performing at UCLA as part of the protests against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. “Those players were volunteers from the orchestra,” Mehta explains, “but there were many. We had a chorus too.”

That was just one of Mehta’s many run-ins. The Times’ longtime music critic Martin Bernheimer was his nemesis, a relationship that Mehta believes got off on the wrong foot from their first interview. During his time with the New York Philharmonic, that city’s press could be vicious, writing that the conductor introduced a sloppiness into the city’s high-gloss orchestra and that he was too much of a showman.

But some critics have mellowed. His concerts with the L.A. Phil in recent years have revealed a musical deepening. And as far as the orchestra is concerned, he is a singular father figure.

During his 16 years here he hired 86 musicians, 12 of whom still play with the Phil. He championed much more new music than he is sometimes given credit for, and he determinedly featured such L.A. composers as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Lukas Foss (when he taught at UCLA), William Kraft (the orchestra’s principal percussionist) and Frank Zappa. Mehta was even one of the earliest champions of Gustavo Dudamel, bringing him to the Israel Philharmonic at the very beginning of the young Venezuelan’s career.

The Mehtas own two villas in Tuscany, Italy. As the conductor of many podiums, as with so many performers, he is a man of the world.

But I ask whether he still considers L.A. home.

“Absolutely,” Mehta insists. “I have never stopped conducting the orchestra. I am here whenever I can be. And it’s my tax home.”

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