About 100 years ago, give or take, a group of Santa Barbara Music Lovers came together to form the Community Arts-Music Association (CAMA), mainly for the purpose of bringing the Los Angeles Philharmonic up to our town to play a concert.

Zubin Mehta
Zubin Mehta. Credit: Courtesy photo

This worked well, the concert was a great success, and became an annual thing. Over the years, CAMA began to branch out, and to book other stellar ensembles from around the world.

In the meantime, CAMA Board member Steve Cloud launched the Masterseries at the Lobero Theatre, for concerts featuring solo artists and chamber ensembles.

After a time, the Masterseries came directly under CAMA’s wing, and the original orchestral series became the International Series, first at the Arlington, and now at the Granada Theatre.

CAMA hasn’t forgotten its roots, of course, and continues to bring the Los Angeles Philharmonic up for a concert every year. This year’s LA Phil concert takes place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 12, at the Granada.

On the podium will be the man who more or less put the LA Phil on the world map, the great Zubin Mehta, leading this fabulous band in the performance of two works: Robert Schumann‘s “Piano Concerto in a-minor, Opus 54” (1845), in which the soloist will be the dazzling young virtuoso Seong-Jin Cho; and Gustav Mahler‘s “Symphony No. 1 in D-Major, ‘Titan,’” (1888), including the gorgeous, traditionally omitted “Blumine” movement.

CAMA notes: “Maestro Mehta first conducted the orchestra in Los Angeles in January 1961 at age 25 before serving as LA Phil’s Music Director from 1962 to 1978. He was honored with the title of Conductor Emeritus during its 2018-2019 Centennial season. Maestro Mehta’s tremendous sense of social responsibility has taken his music around the world, and he is living proof of the power of music to bridge cultures and break social and political barriers.”

Amen to that last sentence. Truly, it is wonderful to have an occasion to celebrate the long and illustrious career of Zubin Mehta, whom I consider, as Robert Craft said of Georg Solti “a musician without peer.”

Mehta was the de facto scoutmaster of an incomparable group of musical friends that included Itzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pré, and Pinchas Zuckerman.

He led the next generation of conductors who followed Leonard Bernstein‘s lead in championing the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, after the 1960 Mahler centennial.

On top of that, Mehta’s recordings, with the LA Phil, of several symphonies of Anton Bruckner pretty much sparked a Bruckner revival that continues to this day.

Mehta was a student of one of the great musical pedagogues of the twentieth century, Hans Swarowsky (1899-1975). I learned this in a roundabout way, from a conversation I had with the late, lamented Varujan Kojian (music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony (1985-93).

Kojian told me that while serving as concertmaster of the LA Phil under Mehta, he had gotten the itch to conduct, and had begun to moonlight with various ensembles around the LA basin. Mehta got wind of it and called him into his office.

“If you really want to be a conductor, and not just a baton-waver, then I had better send you to my teacher, Hans Swarowsky, in Vienna,” Mehta told him.

So Kojian went to Vienna. I later learned that Daniel Barenboim had also studied with Swarowsky, as had Seiji Ozawa.

Music directors often have the reputation of being tyrants, but all the glimpses I have had of Mehta’s work-style suggest that — for all that he can appear extremely fierce, when the occasion demands — he is more like a shepherd than a tyrant.

Longtemps, I had hated the opening bars of Brahms‘ First Symphony; it felt like an elephant standing on my neck, and slowly putting more and more weight on it. Then I heard Mehta’s recording and the dark clouds lifted.

The tempo, brisk instead of the usually dragging lurch, was a big part of it, but the clarity, the luminous glide of the opening, put me on track to loving Brahms and his symphonies for the first time.

Later, I acquired a recording of the Brahms First conducted by Swarowsky, and I held my breath as the stylus descended, but there it was. As important as it is, in one’s social life, to attend the right schools, it is even more important, in one’s professional life, to have the right mentor.

The Principal Sponsor of this LA Phil Concert is the Mosher Foundation; Sponsors include Bitsy and Denny Bacon, the Towbes Fund for the Performing Arts, a field of interest fund of the Santa Barbara Foundation.

Co-Sponsors include: Robert Boghosian and Mary E. Gates-Warren, Christine and Robert Emmons, and the Zegar Family Fund.

Tickets to this concert are $38-$146, and can be bought at the Granada Theatre Box Office, 1214 State St,, by phone at 805-899-2222, or online at https://ticketing.granadasb.org/18046/18056.