Zubin Mehta, 87, flicks his legendary baton with Indian orchestra for first time

Zubin Mehta is in Mumbai headlining two sold-out shows conducting the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI). After the first show on Saturday night, Mehta’s baton was auctioned to raise funds for the education of underprivileged children

Members of the Symphony Orchestra of India are holding final rehearsals inside the grand Tata Theatre at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) ironing out the kinks before they kick off their 17th season on Saturday. Outside, there is a rush of workers, caught in a sudden downpour, ensuring everything is in perfect order. The seasoned ushers, usually blasé about celebrities, are swept up in sudden excitement as a gleaming blue Mercedes drives up to the back-stage entrance, and an 87-year-old self-styled “Bombay boy” steps out.

Zubin Mehta is in Mumbai headlining two sold-out shows conducting the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) (File Photo)

Zubin Mehta, immaculate in his tuxedo, is in Mumbai headlining two sold-out shows conducting the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI). After the first show on Saturday night, Mehta’s baton was auctioned to raise funds for the education of underprivileged children. Other than the NCPA — headed by his friend and India’s foremost Western classical music aficionado Khushroo Suntook — the event is organised in association with the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation, named after Mehta’s father and his first guru. This is the first time Mehta is conducting an Indian orchestra, a milestone that he’s rather excited about.

“Khushroo, my friend of 80 years, has been asking me to do this for a long time and I am finally here.” He has been rehearsing with the SOI all week, fine-tuning their renditions of classics including Mozart’s The Marriage Of Figaro, Franz Schubert’s Eighth Symphony and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (Titan). “I didn’t expect the quality that I have experienced at the rehearsals. It is a really very fine orchestra that can be compared with a lot of good ensembles all over the world.”

Mehta is well placed to make that comparison. He’s spent a lifetime steeped in the Western classical tradition: his father Mehli was a self-taught violinist who founded the Bombay Symphony Orchestra in 1935, and played the violin on the iconic theme tune for All India Radio composed by Jewish Czech refugee Walter Kaufmann. Between the musicians hanging around at home and his father’s extensive collection of Western classical records, the young Zubin had already finished a crash course in music before he moved to Vienna in 1954 to study music professionally. As he told the audience at a small, Karan Thapar-hosted discussion at the Taj hotel on Thursday night in Mumbai, “I am audio-taught. By the time I went to study music at 18, I knew more than most of the other students.”

That head start perhaps helps explain Mehta’s meteoric rise. In 1958, he won first place at the Liverpool International Conductor’s Competition, earning a one-year contract as associate conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. By 1960, he had built up enough equity in the classical music world to get called in as a substitute for some of the world’s best-known conductors, filling in when they weren’t available. These substitute appearances helped him land a job as the conductor and musical director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra at age 24.

This was followed by a celebrated 16-season stint as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic where he perfected, what LA Times music critic Mark Swed calls, the “Mehta sound”: all vibrant brass, big percussion, and a “wide-screen, technicolor orchestral effect”. In 1977 he became the music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra — an association that lasted for over 50 years, till he retired as music director emeritus in 2019 — and a year later, he also took up the same job at the New York Philharmonic. He also added opera to his repertoire, directing the Bavarian State Opera, and conducted the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma during the first ever concert of the opera supergroup Three Tenors.

But for Mehta, the most important achievements of his career have involved using his talents to help heal social and political divides. He’s performed concerts for Hungarian refugees fleeing the 1956 revolution, for Lebanese Christian refugees displaced in the aftermath of the 1980s civil war, and for Bosnians in a bombed-out Sarajevo after the Bosnian War.

His 1994 concerts in India with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, held two years after New Delhi diplomatically recognised Tel Aviv, “broke a political taboo”, according to the New York Times. Almost two decades later, he brought the Bavarian State Orchestra to Srinagar, braving threats of violence from separatist leaders. Throughout his career, he’s used music to build such diplomatic bridges, dating all the way back to one of the very first concerts of his life.

In Mumbai, as is his habit each time he visits the city of his birth, Mehta went to 21, Cuffe Parade, the building where he grew up alongside his neighbour Yusuf Hameid, the chairman of Cipla. From 1938 onward Mehta and Hamied have been taking pictures in front of that building to mark their years of comradeship. Hamied is not in Mumbai this time around and with the city resembling a giant construction site, thanks to the ongoing metro work, Mehta also had some trouble locating 21, Cuffe Parade. As everything around him changes, the sublime sound of music the maestro creates each time he lifts that baton, remains the only constant.