Word: mehtas
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...stage in U.C.L.A.'s Royce Hall last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Conductor Zubin Mehta got ready to play. Unlike most concertgoers, the audience fastened its attention not on the musicians but on Syn-Ket, a strange instrument set on a table in mid-stage...
Some conductors will do anything to get an audience. Last week at a regular concert of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Maestro Zubin Mehta showed motion pictures. Now, it is well known that in Hollywood country, people will come out to see anything on film. And it is equally well known that when it comes to introducing new music, Mehta is a genuine 20th century fox. But wasn't this carrying show...
...Mehta was just following the score of Contextures, a new multimedia orchestral work which he commissioned from Composer William Kraft. Accompanying the first movement of Contextures, subtitled "Riots-Decade 60," was a color film in which abstract patterns had been scratched, brushed and drawn on celluloid, and punctuated with black and white stills of last summer's riots in U.S. cities. Accompanying the nonstop fourth and fifth movements was an exacting film inspection of Painter Reginald Pollack's works on the themes of segregation and violence-closeups of hooded Klan marauders, straining limbs, the curled bodies of innocent...
Since Kraft also happens to be Mehta's principal tympanist, it was not surprising that he made extra use of such percussion esoterica as roto-toms (a set of small tuned drums), muted gongs, anvils and Chinese wind chimes. What was unusual and effective, however, was the relaxed, jazzy undercoating that showed that even an age of turmoil and anxiety can have fun. But Contextures mainly had to do with fierce tensions and dissonances in which various sections of the orchestra played frenetically against each other. "I suppose this is a belligerent work," says Kraft. "But that...
...Calif., to raise hosannas to Soprano Lotte Lehmann on her 80th birthday. It was the sort of occasion that called forth a telegram of congratulations from West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and commanded the presence of such votaries as Tenor Lauritz Melchior, Actress Judith Anderson and Conductor Zubin Mehta. "I am excited and overwhelmed," said Lehmann, who retired 17 years ago but still teaches master classes in voice at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "It is not everyone who can say, 'I have lived exactly as I wanted to live...