Word: mets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Manager Rudolf Bing saw Mehta conduct Tosca in Montreal in 1964 and recalls that "it was very funny. I engaged him." Funny? "There were many mistakes," explains Bing. "He was totally inexperienced. But it was all overshadowed by his personality and talent. Experience anyone can get." Mehta made his Met debut in December 1965 with Aïda, quickly became one of the top cocks in the Met pit. This season he has conducted three major productions, including a new Carmen. Says Bing: "I am still impressed by his talent and personality-and now it is less funny...
...television films, frequently darts off to orchestra podiums and festival halls from London to Tel Aviv. Last spring he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic on a U.S. tour; after each six days of traveling, while his musicians rested for a day, Mehta crisscrossed the nation to conduct a traveling Met production of Turandot in Dallas, Detroit, Cleveland and Atlanta...
Primary Spark. Yet Mehta's motions are by no means shallow showmanship. They help make his performance "live all the time," in the words of Met Tenor Nicolai Gedda, who sings under Mehta in Carmen. Says Gedda: "He does not drag and he does not rush; he has the kind of pulse that is absolutely right." This is Mehta's essence as a musician: an instinct for the living pulse of a piece of music, along with a molten core of romantic feeling and a point-of-no-return commitment...
Indeed "they" have, all the way from such solidly schooled, well-established figures as the Minneapolis Symphony's Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, 44, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw's Bernard Haitink, 38, down to such newer personalities as the Houston Symphony's André Previn, 38, and the Met's Thomas Schippers, 37. At the top is a crack cadre of gifted conductors...
Recently he sat at his dressing room piano after a rehearsal at the Met and sketched a bravado musical self-portrait with his favorite Strauss works. He struck a theme from Don Juan: an image for the dark, liquid eyes, flaring nostrils and smoldering visage that prompted one of his many female admirers to compare him to "an untamed animal-sensual and earthy." Then Don Quixote: a reflection of his penchant for tilting in public at sacred cultural institutions. Then Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks: the insouciant wink-and-nudge of a joker who likes to imitate other people...