Upon first seeing Zubin Mehta on Disney Hall’s stage last night, it was difficult not to be taken aback by his appearance. His frailty was a marked contrast from the robustness he exuded the last time I saw him in 2019. Yet it was also moving to see him take the podium, to continue thriving as an artist, in defiance of time and his recent episodes of illness, refusing to be overwhelmed by the very music history of which he is a part. Conveying a dignified, wounded heroism, it was little wonder that the audience greeted his arrival with a standing ovation. The moment he sat at the podium and raised his hands before the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra that long ago had galvanized his international career, all concerns ceased. In the bejeweled enchantment of Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, Mehta revealed his fountain of youth.
From beginning to end Mehta led a performance that was rhythmically alert, impassioned and flowed with noble sweep. He held Gurre-Lieder together with irrepressible conviction; no easy task in a score that is equal parts Tristan und Isolde fanfic by an effusive twentysomething and the reflections (and occasional embarrassed scorn) of these youthful transgressions from his middle-aged self. It was not only Schoenberg’s sense of drama, but also his ear-tickling detail for color that Mehta loosed from the score: gurgling bass clarinets, rasping ratchet and chains, booming tuba and contrabass trombone, doleful English horns (Tristan again!).
No less varied is how Schoenberg employs the massive vocal resources in Gurre-Lieder. Considerable challenges are posed by the score, all of which were surmounted memorably by the evening’s five solo singers and speaker. Christine Goerke and Violeta Urmana were both refulgent as the doomed Tove and the Wood Dove respectively. Gerhard Siegel brimmed with acid and spite in his brief turn as the fool Klaus-Narr. Perhaps most affecting of all was the vulnerable, tormented Waldemar of tenor John Matthew Myers, whose honeyed voice and secure word painting gave no impression that he was engaged as a last-minute replacement. His was a voice that made of Gurre’s plight an internal drama, a play of shadows projected on the walls of his own mind. Virtually a soloist in its own right was the Los Angeles Master Chorale, whose men as Gurre’s undead vassals were transparent in tone and elocution throughout.
There was something else imparted to the audience in this performance from the orchestra, soloists, chorus and conductor. As Mehta drew from the Master Chorale an ecstatic, hall-shaking rendition of “Seht die Sonne”, one sensed that it augured a new day not only for Gurre, but also for Schoenberg himself. His ecstasy, his immediacy of expression did not see its twilight in Gurre-Lieder, but its dawn; the morning rays that drench its closing measures shining the light to the visionary and rarefied heights its composer would subsequently reach.
