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A musical homecoming By Noam Ben Ze'ev Tags: music, Zubin Mehta, India  In 1961, a young guest conductor arrived for a debut appearance with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra - an international star who had completed his studies at the music academy in Vienna only a few years earlier: Zubin Mehta. He was the same age as the orchestra: Both had been born 25 years earlier, he in what was then called Bombay, India, and the orchestra in Palestine, after its players arrived by ship, most of them refugees from pre-war Europe. The orchestra fell in love with Mehta. Eight years later they appointed him musical director, and in 1981 he was given a lifetime tenure. Thus, the maestro, one of the leading figures in the international music scene, and the IPO have been together for almost half a century, in a partnership that is one of the longest ever in the history of symphony orchestras. Since that first concert together, they have not separated, and Mehta has become an Israeli for all intents and purposes. In 1991 he even received the Israel Prize. But the conductor's homeland is India, he is devoted to it, and at the beginning of the month he traveled there with the orchestra. "We are staging the first real musical mini-festival in Bombay," he says before the trip, in a conversation in his suite at the Tel Aviv Hilton. "Five concerts, four by the IPO, one a recital by Pinchas Zukerman and his wife [Canadian cellist Amanda Forsyth], and among the participants will be Pl?cido Domingo. I organized a concert for him and for soprano Barbara Frittoli and the orchestra in the Bombay cricket stadium, where I grew up." Advertisement There is a special expression on Mehta's face when he speaks about cricket, "my sport," as he puts it: "In my childhood I would go to games in the stadium with my father, who was an excellent player." Did you play too? Mehta: "I started at university [in India], where I was studying medicine, but I stopped because after two semesters, I left to study music in Vienna." Mehta's father, Mehli, was a cricket player, but mainly a conductor and teacher, and one of the pioneers in establishing an infrastructure for classical music in India. "The aim of the festival is to raise money for a music school named after my father," Mehta explains. "There are 17 million people in Bombay, but only a few thousand who love classical music. The auditoriums in the city are always full when there are concerts, but that's not enough: My intention is to provide a more thorough musical education. "It's all a matter of budgets," he continues. "The government is cutting back the culture budget, and Indians have no tradition of support through private donations. My Parsi compatriots actually do have such a tradition. In Bombay there are many institutions, such as schools and hospitals, that were built from donations by the Parsi community, and they also provide their services free of charge, but it's becoming increasingly difficult, because there is no government recognition of the donations. What did [president Ronald] Reagan do in the United States in his day? Although he completely canceled the country's culture budgets, he prepared an alternative program through which a private donation is recognized generously by the income-tax authorities. In India, as in Israel, Italy and England, that is not the case." The school named after his father has not yet been built, but the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation is already active in Mumbai, supporting several hundred children who are studying music: "But this is not an infrastructure of musical education, certainly not of learning an orchestra instrument," says Mehta. "At most they study violin or piano. Despite my crowded schedule I'm active and I contribute, although that's never enough. Here in Israel, too, I should do much more. Here, too, we do too little - for example, in order to bring Jews and Arabs closer to one another. Together. The problem is that the production of such concerts, even if they are done with great willingness, costs money, and there is no funding for that in the State of Israel. "Daniel Barenboim does a lot in that area," he adds, "but he has support from the government of Spain and Andalusia, where there is a dream of reviving the Golden Age when Jews and Muslims lived together, Maimonides and Ibn Gvirol together with the major figures of Muslim culture prior to the Christian conquest. Here there's less of that." 'No perfect program' The IPO recently published its program for the coming season. As usual it is made up of the mainstream classical repertory, ranging from Beethoven to Brahms, without many glittering new names from the global music scene. "Do you have an alternative program?" asks Mehta, responding to the usual criticism about the so-called IPO spirit. "There's no perfect concert program. Organize six programs for me now and I'll show you how much is missing in each of them. "And why don't [guest musicians] come?" he adds. "Everyone has his own reasons. I got a phone call from a world-renowned pianist who happens to be Jewish, who said that he refuses to come to Israel for political reasons. He's boycotting. And a conductor informed me that if he comes, his wife will divorce him. And there are some who demand huge salaries and whose connection to Israel is not so strong that they'll come for two to three weeks for 1/25 of their regular salary, as do the great conductors Christoph von Dohn?nyi and Kurt Masur, who come regularly. "Our job is to find a balance between the conductors and the popular stars who attract the Israeli audience on the one hand, and new faces to whom we must give exposure on the other," adds Mehta. "Helmuth Rilling, Pinchas Zukerman, Rafael Fr?hbeck de Burgos, cellist Heinrich Schiff and pianist Murray Perahia - these are beloved artists, who are among the top musicians in the world. And the new faces - Gustavo Dudamel, for example. Who discovered him? We did. Avi Shoshani, the [IPO's] executive director, forms personal ties, in the absence of financial means for bringing people. For example, he traveled to Dudamel's wedding in South America. Now Gustavo is already a big star." There are never any Israelis among the new faces. Why? "There always are. In opera roles, for example." But not as soloists or conductors in the most important concerts. "The bitter debate is over the audience. If you bring Israelis, the audience won't come. That's the prevailing opinion." At the orchestra's 70th anniversary celebrations, the only Israelis were pianists Shai Wosner and Saleem Abboud Ashkar, and the audience received them with enthusiasm. "Yes, those who came loved them, but it's not clear what percentage they are of all the listeners. In any case, we have additional channels for supporting young Israelis," continues Mehta, mentioning the Buchman-Mehta School of Music, formerly the Rubin Academy of Music, in Tel Aviv, which was rescued from collapse by philanthropist Joseph Buchman. "The students come and play with the orchestra, and although they don't receive a salary, if one of the players is ill, they can jump in and replace him and then they are paid. This is a very important experience, and our soloists teach there, too. We spoke about a lack of donations: Joseph Buchman donates half a million dollars to the school every year, and he has promised to do so for many years to come." Part of the orchestra's financial distress, notes Mehta, stems from a decline in the number of subscribers. Why has this happened? "Were there ever 50 satellite channels on television?" he replies rhetorically. "Were there ever as many entertainment and sports programs as there are now? No. And that's all right, it's healthy competition. Therefore, we need attractions. Gimmicks. The 'Jeans' series. The 'Noon Intermezzo' series. We have to attract people, there's no choice." A similar situation exists in Italy, says Mehta, who is also the musical director of the Maggio Musicale Orchestra in Florence. "We worked there for a month on Wagner's 'Die Meistersinger von N?rnberg,' and 600 people came - imagine!" He holds his head in a gesture of despair. "And Berlioz's opera 'The Trojans' - do you know what fantastic singers we had? And they didn't come to that either. But give them 'La Traviata' with a mediocre cast and see how the auditorium will always be filled. And in London," he continues, "did you see the weekend newspapers there? 'Spanish Fiesta,' 'Revealing Tchaikovsky' - they're also trying to bring an audience." And in Germany? "At the Berlin Opera not everything is full, but in Munich it is," he says about the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he served as music director until 2006. "There they fill the halls even for 20th-century operas by Henze, and Handel's operas from the Baroque period." Mehta feels that the renovations of Tel Aviv's Mann Auditorium, and the construction of the square and the parking lot there, have contributed to the decline in subscribers: "The renovations are causing the audience to give up. People have stopped coming because they have no place to park. When it's finished, the situation will improve greatly, and if we had a new hall, it would be even better. In Los Angeles that's exactly what happened. A hall with 1,800 seats is what we need, and we would fill it - not like the 2,700 seats we have here, which we have to fill as well as struggling with the acoustics every time." Mehta is referring to the plan for the Mann Auditorium to undergo a more radical change, which failed because of public opposition. Renovation also costs money. "It's hard to believe how much money there is in this country. It's endless. I would have no problem getting $150 million to build the new auditorium, I have a list of people who can pay for it. I could similarly find a donor to pay $80 million to have the auditorium named after him; there are quite a number of people for whom that sum is negligible." Between Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, Florence and Munich, Mehta remains very devoted to his homeland. "Recently people from Bollywood asked me to do a gala concert for the film industry. I told them I'm willing to give half an hour of music, but only serious music. We'll do it in Las Vegas with the local symphony orchestra, which is not at all bad." Bollywood is coming to America? "Oh, Indian films are immensely popular in America, the Bollywood people are coming to Hollywood, too. There is a growing Indian population in the United States. There have been Indian spectacles that filled Madison Square Garden. "India is known on the one hand for its accelerated technological progress and on the other for its terrible poverty. Sixty percent of the inhabitants of Bombay have no pure drinking water, whereas in Shanghai, for example, the ratio is the opposite. In the same way that in India 30 percent of the population is literate, in China it is 100 percent. In democratic regimes it is impossible to force things on people the way the Chinese do - for example, to destroy entire neighborhoods of houses to expand the access roads to the Olympic stadium. "And when a hurricane hits the Indian coasts, nobody hears about it: I'm happy for the residents of Miami who can evacuate in time, but when the same hurricane reaches India, people simply sit on the beach and die, every year. They don't have cars with which to flee from the coast to the interior." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Hitting Hezbollah Iraqi site reports Nasrallah was poisoned last week and Iranian doctors saved him. Terror as support Al-Qaida-linked Web site supports McCain for president by means of welcoming terror.   1.   Mann Auditorium 22:19  |  Ruth 22/10/08

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