UCSB Arts & Lectures brings the great Israel Philharmonic Orchestra to town for its first-time ever concert in Santa Barbara, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1, in the Arlington Theater, 1317 State St.
The orchestra will be conducted by Zubin Mehta, their phenomenal music director for life.
The orchestra will perform the Suite from Amit Poznansky‘s score for the Israeli comedy, “Footnote” (2011); Wolfgang Mozart‘s Symphony No. 36 in C-Major, K. 425, “Linz” (1783); and Franz Schubert‘s Symphony No. 9 in C-Major, D. 944 “The Great C” (1828).
This promises to be a sensational concert.
The story of the Israel Philharmonic is a dramatic and inspiring one, born of the death throes of old Europe.
It is a tale of accomplished Jewish musicians who lost their positions in the early days of the Third Reich, who fled to Palestine, finding life and a new mission in the Promised Land, where they were gathered into an orchestra of virtuosos by a Polish violinist named Bronislaw Huberman, who led them to glory and musical grandeur.
The story of Mehta, his life and career, is equally remarkable and utterly unique.
Born into a Parsi family in Bombay (now Mumbai), where his father founded a symphony orchestra, he was the child of another Diaspora — that of the Zoroastrians that fled Persia between the 8th and 10th centuries CE to avoid persecution following the Moslem conquest of Persia.
After receiving superb musical instruction from his father, Mehta went to Vienna to study conducting.
Graduating three years later, he began his own conquest of the classical music world, moving from triumph to triumph, and quickly rising to the summit of his profession, where he has been ever since.
These two stirring narratives will come together on the Arlington stage.
But, on a more personal and local note, we in Santa Barbara already are very much in Mehta’s debt.
Let me back up a bit. As a teenaged music lover, I had a problem with the opening bars of Brahms‘s “First Symphony.” The recordings I heard made it ominous and repellent, so I always lifted the tone arm and started listening with the second movement.
Then, on the radio, I heard a recording of the symphony by Zubin Mehta, and the veil of the temple was rent asunder; the first movement became coherent and compelling, and I have not had a problem with the work since.
Fast-forward to a conversation I had with the late Varujan Kojian, who in his tenure as music director, made the Santa Barbara Symphony into a great orchestra.
Kojian told me that, when he was concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Mehta, he had gotten the itch to conduct, and began to sneak off to conducting gigs in places like Pasadena.
Mehta busted him at it but, great soul that he is, his reaction was neither angry nor punitive.
“If you really want to do it, and become a real conductor instead of a baton-waver, I’ll send you to my mentor, Hans Swarowsky in Vienna,” he told Kojian. And he did.
The name Hans Swarowsky was familiar to me from the labels on the Music Treasures of the World records my parents had gotten from the Grolier Society in the late 1950s, and from the Vanguard Everyman records I had collected in the 1960s.
I can think of at least a dozen works that Swarowsky’s recording was the first performance I heard.
At the time, however, I was in thrall to Toscanini and Klemperer, Bernstein and Leinsdorf, and never encountered Swarowsky’s name anywhere but on those record labels. So, I didn’t associate him with the feelings I had for those works.
Kojian’s story set off all kinds of echoes in my head.
I looked up Swarowsky and discovered he had been one of the most influential teachers of the 20th century.
Rather than bore you with a catalogue of all the great conductors who had learned their craft under his tutelage, I will just say that while Zubin Mehta was studying with Swarowsky, two of his classmates and close friends were Claudio Abbado and Daniel Barenboim.
Sometime after my conversation with Kojian, I acquired a Swarowsky recording of Brahms’s “First Symphony.” Eureka! There was the compelling cogency I had discovered in Mehta’s performance.
As it happens, one of my favorites among the Music Treasures recordings, which I still have, was one of Schubert’s “Ninth Symphony” (then called the “Seventh”).
I dug it out and found Swarowsky had conducted it. I have never heard Mehta conduct the work. I can’t wait.
Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures in association with CAMA, Congregation B’nai B’rith and the Taubman Foundation Symposia in Jewish Studies at UCSB.
Tickets are $35-$150 for the general public, and $25 for UCSB students with valid student ID. For tickets and more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures, 893-3535, the Arlington Theatre, 963-4408, or visit www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.