Word: montreal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Metropolitan Opera General 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...
...strain of triangulating his career through New York, Montreal and Los Angeles became too much for even Mehta, and last year he said goodbye to Montreal. But he is still a jet-age conductor who hops continents to keep engagements. Besides normal coast-to-coast shuttling, he detours to make recordings and 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...
Like many of his contemporaries on the podium, Mehta nearly always conducts without a score ("Half of our trade is in the eyes"), relying on a fantastic capacity to ingest compositions in a few readings and hold them in his well-stocked memory. During his years with the Montreal orchestra he had to memorize practically an entire new program every week, often while en route between engagements. One of the solutions he worked out was to conduct staging rehearsals of an operatic score while studying an orchestral score that was placed on the floor next to him. This learn...
...prize). On the Liverpool podium, Mehta quickly discovered that "I was just unprepared to lead a professional orchestra. I learned at their expense but I learned." Two seasons of guest appearances and substituting for ailing elders gained him attention in America, and in 1961 he arrived in Montreal, says Concertmaster Calvin Sieb, "like a shooting star, burning all the time...
...says, "and smell the diapers boiling. We grew apart." In 1964 the Mehtas got a divorce. "It just happened," Carmen says now. "I never did anything nasty to him, and he never did anything nasty to me." Mehta asked his younger brother Zarin, an accountant who had immigrated to Montreal via England, to look in occasionally on Carmen and the children (a daughter Zarina, now 9, and a son Merwan, 7). Zarin looked in occasionally, then more often. In 1966 Zubin, who was rehearsing the Israel Philharmonic in Haifa, suddenly announced that he wanted to dedicate the concert...