Zubin Mehta's Harmonics of Diplomacy

In Globe-Spanning Career, Conductor Has Artfully Fused Populism & Politics

Zubin Mehta in 2000. Born in India and trained in Vienna, he now heads orchestras based in Berlin, Vienna, Florence and Tel Aviv. (By Jim Cooper -- Associated Press)

TEL AVIV -- Ramsis Kasis picks at his 11-string oud, a solo that soon makes room for Sami Kashibon's oriental violin. A high, plaintive whine arcs through the auditorium. Peter Marck deepens the sound with his double bass as the audience gazes down silently on the semicircle of Arab and Jewish musicians, whose building rhythm is being slowly assembled by an Indian at center stage.

At 70, Zubin Mehta is conducting another social experiment. The sold-out crowd has come for an evening with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Mehta's most enduring musical home. A waltz by Johann Strauss Jr. is on the program and a polka by Josef Strauss, typical of the classical standards he is known for.

But this small ensemble combining Israeli Arab musicians with several Jewish ones is also classic Mehta -- provocative, political and mischievous. How, he wondered before the show, would an audience dotted with Jewish skullcaps receive the wild Arab rhythms or the obvious message he is sending with its ethnically mixed membership?

Kashibon's solo ends and the orchestra's violin section erupts in bow-tapping tribute. Mehta brings in the drums with a sharp poke of his baton. The crowd begins clapping in time, urged along by Haya Samir, an Arab vocalist, who adds her rising voice to the driving percussion.

The maestro, now as old as the fabled orchestra in front of him, begins dancing as much as conducting. The hands that one veteran viola player in the orchestra calls "the clearest I have ever seen" sweep in large circles as the drums, violins and a single trilling voice come together, then crash down in an abrupt coda. The house comes down, too.

"Better than I thought," Mehta says later. "I'd love to take them on tour and show people that Arabs and Jews can at least make music together."

Of the many words written about Mehta over the years, "subtle" has rarely been one of them. His nearly five-decade professional career has propelled him from a musical home in Mumbai (then called Bombay) through a prestigious apprenticeship in Vienna to the head of the most demanding orchestras on three continents.

Along the path from prodigy to graying star he has emerged as perhaps the most dashing personality in the ostensibly staid world of classical music, the embodiment of a quickening cultural globalization that he has harnessed often in service of his beliefs, artistic and otherwise.

His performance partners have ranged from the Three Tenors to Frank Zappa, his venues from the Hollywood Bowl to the Jerusalem Theater, where the audience donned gas masks during a solidarity performance he gave amid the Persian Gulf War. His critics have complained that he is more show than substance, an astonishing performer but rarely an innovative interpreter of classical music.

Mehta attributes some of the complaints to snobbishness. His populist approach -- sweeping productions of late-romantic favorites, the battlefield-morale concerts, a requiem in bombed-out Sarajevo -- has won him many admirers in the seats of countless concert halls and in the orchestras he has developed.

"He leads not only the orchestras but the audiences," says Marck, 54, who has played the double bass for him here for three decades. "He is always looking for ways to make the music relevant to the audience."

Slightly thicker in the middle than during his night-life days in Los Angeles and New York, Mehta maintains a relentless schedule with his regular orchestras in Berlin, Vienna, Florence and Tel Aviv. He does very little guest conducting, preferring to work with musicians over years. He has recently begun a long-term project in Valencia, Spain, orchestrating Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle, a daunting production he has staged to high praise in the past.