The music of Johannes Brahms runs deeply in the Mehta conducting dynasty. Zubin Mehta’s father, Mehli Mehta, once told me, “Brahms is my God.” Indeed, during the Brahms sesquicentennial year of 1983, the senior Mehta led all 11 of the composer’s orchestral works in one spring festival with his American Youth Symphony.
His son has been no less devoted. Zubin Mehta has recorded three sets of the Brahms symphonies, and a fourth one, with the Munich Philharmonic, will come out in the U.S. later this month. And this is not to mention the conductor’s multiple recordings of the composer’s concertos over the decades. Mehta also courageously led a cycle of the symphonies and concertos with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall in December 2018 and January 2019 while still recovering from hip surgery. It was during this run of concerts that the orchestra made him conductor emeritus.
Since then, just about everything Mehta has touched with the LA Phil has turned into musical gold. It wasn’t always this way. Years ago, he could hit the heights of inspiration one night and trail off into indifference the next. Now, at 88, he is one of the truly great conductors of our times.
For evidence, observe what has become of Mehta’s conception of Brahms’s Symphony No. 2, which he led on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 8, at Disney Hall with his once and current orchestra. This live performance showed mastery compared to his first recording (made with the New York Philharmonic during the first year of his 13-season run as that orchestra’s music director). That recording was a bit of a mess, especially in the work’s coda, where the orchestra slammed through Brahms’s posted stop signs in a pell-mell rush to the finish line.
On Sunday, the tempos in general were slower than before, but not uncomfortably so. The Mehta sound — a grand, thick-around-the-middle, high-calorie blend eminently suited to Brahms — emerged in more polished form, everything now flowing naturally in a manner that, to my ears, recalled the style of conductor Bruno Walter (who was recording with LA Phil musicians around the time that Mehta broke onto the city’s music scene).
The first movement repeat was not observed, but I didn’t miss it. The transition to the development section was smoothly integrated. The fourth-movement finale may have been somewhat slower, but the ensemble still made a vigorous showing with sharper accents — and this time, Mehta nailed those pauses near the end, timing them just right. The patience paid off with a blazing final chorale.
The afternoon began with Brahms’s Violin Concerto. Following in the footsteps of Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman, among many soloists who have played the piece with Mehta, was another big name, Leonidas Kavakos. Always a superb, responsive accompanist and partner, Mehta delivered a broadly emphatic lead-in to Kavakos’s entrance and gave the violinist considerable leeway to linger elegantly. Kavakos’s tone wasn’t the ripest one might encounter, but his phrasing ebbed and flowed masterfully, often creating suspense as he crept around the corners of the line. Somewhat more evident than in previous renditions from Mehta, the recurring theme of the Hungarian-flavored finale had an exquisitely timed hesitation that could have lifted you briefly out of your chair if you were not careful.
After that, the audience response prompted Kavakos to offer not one but two encores, neither of them by Brahms: a brightly played Gigue from J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 2 and the Largo from the same composer’s Sonata No. 3.
