Mehta Leaves N.Y. Philharmonic in Blaze of Sound

NEW YORK —  Zubin Mehta concluded his final concert as music director of the New York Philharmonic Tuesday night in an indisputable blaze of glorious sound.

Doing what everyone agrees he does best, Mehta expertly marshalled his huge orchestra, chorus and soloists--forces more than 400 strong--for Schoenberg’s massive cantata, “Gurrelieder,” in the acoustically energetic Avery Fisher Hall of Lincoln Center. The resultant climaxes may have set the record for loudness of unamplified music.

The “Gurrelieder” performances generated generally favorable responses from the New York critics about the power of the sound, about the control and the sheer brilliance of orchestral playing, about the conductor’s secure command over such an army of musicians.

Donal Henhan of the New York Times, however, expressed reservations regarding “decibels and energy taking the place of expression.” He also regretted the conductor’s conveying “too little of the piece’s legendary haze and ‘Tristanesque’ mood.”

Over the span of three farewell concerts, Mehta got all the expected tributes from dignitaries, politicians, musicians and his orchestra in appreciation for his 13 seasons as the N.Y. Philharmonic’s music director. In a telegram read at the Tuesday concert, George Bush credited Mehta with having helped “reinvigorate and broaden the appeal of classical music.” The President also called the glamorous conductor “a man of the people.”

No one, however, called Mehta a man of the critics.

Mehta has never had strong support from the local press, which has frequently complained about musical superficiality hidden under a kind of blunt orchestral flashiness. The complaints were familiar to those who had followed his career with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Writing in the New York Post, Shirley Fleming found the “Gurrelieder” a “fitting farewell performance,” in that “Mehta emphasized the power and the thrust of the score” while capturing only some, but not all, of ‘its mystery and occasional delicacy.” Peter Goodman, in New York Newsday, noted that “Mehta made no attempt to hold the instrumentalists back.”

But what has been, perhaps, worse for Mehta than negative reviews, which are seldom entirely damning and almost never impolite, has been a neglect of the New York Philharmonic. It is widely perceived in critical circles that the orchestra is not especially newsworthy in a town that hosts the majority of great American and European orchestras each season. Critics not specifically required to cover Mehta’s performances seldom do.

The influential New Yorker critic, Andrew Porter, for instance, normally pays Mehta no attention at all in his magazine column.

Directing most of his anger at the New York Times, Mehta decided an appropriate farewell gesture would be to do the same. In a major Times feature on Mehta Sunday, James R. Oestreich wrote that Mehta had refused to be interviewed for the piece.

“They haven’t asked me for 13 years,” Mehta is quoted as having said through an intermediary, Philharmonic personnel manager Carl Schiebler, “Why should I do it now?” Oestreich, however, noted that the conductor had been regularly interviewed by Times critics and reporters, most recently in 1988.

Mehta, it was reported, also felt that every time he had tried to do something good, he was stung by the press.

Mehta did, however, grant interviews elsewhere. On the day the Times interview was refused, Mehta was prominently featured in the paper’s food section extolling his love for the hottest chiles imaginable. The Philharmonic press office also invited critics from the three New York tabloids to interview Mehta, which they did.

Asked by Goodman, in Newsday, why the press says such bad things about the conductor, Mehta replied that it does not reflect public opinion. The Philharmonic sells 95.5% of its tickets, which Mehta thought “very good, considering what they read about us.”

Yet, whether New Yorkers took to Mehta the way the Los Angeles public did during his 17-year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a large question not easily answered.

It may be significant that the house was not full for the “Gurrelieder” performance last Friday when Mehta was on hand for his final subscription concert (the Tuesday performance was a special non-subscription event). Despite many people outside soliciting tickets to the reportedly sold-out concert, there were a glaring number of empty seats within the hall, and many more subscribers went home at intermission.

Nor has Mehta, who maintains a home in Los Angeles, been a happy New Yorker. “I was never really comfortable living here,” he told Susan Elliott of the Post. Though saying he has been happy working in Fisher Hall, “the minute I leave this building I get depressed,” he admitted. “I can’t hide that. And I’ve never stayed in New York a single day more than I had to.”

Still, Mehta has been a survivor. The Philharmonic is a notoriously tough orchestra on conductors, and his 13 seasons as music director is a record this century. He led 1,070 concerts; he brought in 42 new players (12 of them in first-chair positions); he premiered 30 new works, and he introduced a whopping 425 soloists. He took the orchestra on very successful foreign tours, but, just as important, he also instigated an admirable series of concerts in Harlem.

But Mehta will now put that pretty much behind him. He has no plans to come back to New York next season, and he will appear for only one week the following season, the orchestra’s 150th anniversary. Instead, he will be concentrating his career in Israel, where he is music director of the Israel Philharmonic, and Europe, where he plans to conduct more opera and annually appears with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic. For now, his U.S. appearances will be mainly in Chicago, where he will undertake a “Ring” cycle, beginning next year. He will also begin appearing more regularly again with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he is scheduled for four weeks of concerts next season.

Meanwhile the New York music critics are, according to Raymond Sokolov in his summation of the Mehta critical situation in the Wall Street Journal, “sharpening their scimitars in preparation for Mr. Mehta’s successor, Kurt Masur.”

And if that, or the critics’ more severe attitudes toward Mehta than the public’s, sounds unreasonable, the alternative, Sokolov warns, “is a cultural life presided over by smiling shills for cultural presenters.”