Can Recordings Wreck A Career? Zubin Mehta: A Case Study

If you’ve been a regular visitor to ClassicsToday.com, you will see that we have been gradually working our way through the entire Eloquence label, a reissue series coming from Australia based primarily on recordings from Universal’s Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Philips labels. Among the many interesting releases appearing on CD for the first time are a large number of titles featuring conductor Zubin Mehta with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, including Strauss tone poems and Dvorák symphonies and tone poems, along with orchestral music by Liszt, Ravel, Scriabin, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Ives, Bloch, and Nielsen.

Many of these recordings were very highly praised in their day. I vividly recall the excitement of Mehta’s “Rite of Spring,” or the acclaim given his “Alpine Symphony,” truly a pioneering stereo version of the work. Taken in tandem with some excellent Mahler and Bruckner recordings with the Israel Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, in addition to his regular L.A. ensemble, not to mention some real novelties (Schmidt Fourth Symphony; music by Schoenberg, Varése, and Kraft), it was this impressive discography that gave Mehta an international following among music lovers. While obviously not the only factor in the general perception of him as a major conductor, his recorded performances certainly played a significant role and, more to the point, they speeded up the recognition process, allowing him to reach the pinnacle of his career — his appointment to the New York Philharmonic– at a relatively young age.

And it was at that point that those recordings began to have another, different impact. Mehta’s tenure in New York, from a recording standpoint, was a disaster. This was not entirely his fault. The late 1970s and early ’80s were a period in which the classical music industry (the so-called “major labels” at least) was facing exactly the same problems it faces now: too many recordings of the same old stuff, pressure to cut costs, and general marketing incompetence attested to by countless stupid “crossover” productions and a pathetic attempt to give the medium a youthful, pop-oriented image. Against this background, the New York Philharmonic (and not Mehta) lost its recording contract with Columbia Records in mid-Brahms cycle, and naturally the blame was laid at the conductor’s feet. After all, no one will tell you it was great Brahms. But the truth is much more complicated.

As just about anyone in the regular New York Philharmonic audience can attest, despite the many stories about his deteriorating relationship with the players themselves, the orchestra made some fine music with Mehta. But the recordings tell another tale entirely. Not that they’re all bad; on the contrary, some are excellent. The problem is, many of them consist of music that Mehta had already recorded, and in very few cases are his second recordings better than his first ones. Once again, some of this was not his fault: Columbia’s sonics and production values were markedly inferior to Decca’s. But there was no denying the fact that his remakes of Stravinsky ballets, Strauss tone poems, Mahler symphonies, and other pieces showed no additional insight or differing interpretive view. It was more of the same: been there, done that.

And then there was the ethnic element as well. Mehta had categorized himself as a specialist in the late-Romantic, early-20th-century orchestral repertoire. Not being of Western European (or American) origin, he had no musical patrimony on which to fall back. Many conductors, having exhausted their “specialties,” turn naturally to the music of their homeland in connection with a new recording contract, as for example French contemporary music specialist Jean Martinon did when he left RCA and joined EMI, subsequently recording cycles of orchestral music by Debussy and Ravel. English conductors always have Elgar, Finnish conductors have Sibelius, Americans play Copland and Gershwin, etc. Classical music is highly polarized nationalistically and racially, largely as a result of European cultural chauvinism, and these supposed ethnic affinities, whether real or not, get exploited all the time for commercial and artistic purposes and play a critical role in determining recorded repertoire. In Mehta’s case, having fired off his best shot the first time around with Decca, and facing stiff competition in the same music from just about every other conductor alive, he had nowhere else to turn.

The fact remains, however, that the high points of Mehta’s career as a recording artist and as a concert performer did not coincide. Imagine how different our perception of him might have been if he had made many of his first recordings of his core repertoire in New York instead of Los Angeles! Of course, it was those L.A. recordings that helped get him to New York in the first place, but this help truly was a two-edged sword. Aside from a couple of recent Teldec recordings with the Israel Philharmonic, what has Mehta given us since his departure from New York? Sony initially stood by him, recording Strauss in Berlin, and Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler in Israel. These discs were never promoted with any enthusiasm, and have been largely (if not entirely) deleted. He still enjoys a prestigious and by all accounts successful international career, but is anyone paying attention? What record company cares?

I vividly remember reading the superlative reviews that Mehta and the New York Philharmonic received on their last European tour together, where the featured work was Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a piece that Mehta has not yet recorded. Now he may never get the chance, despite the fact that it’s a cornerstone of his repertoire. Recent live performances reveal that, if his interpretations haven’t exactly changed noticeably, they haven’t fossilized either. He’s just as persuasive as ever in the music he’s best known for. Naturally, I’m not suggesting that he should continue recording more of the same stuff, or that every conductor should have a recording contract, or that we need more mediocre recordings of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Great ones, on the other hand, I think are always welcome. Does Mehta have a few “great ones” left? I think so.

To the extent that recordings should, ideally, represent a given artist at his best, Mehta has been lucky. Many of those Decca CDs now being reissued are terrific. However, it’s also crystal clear to me that the general impression that Mehta is an artist who is somehow “played out” is simply not true. It’s a product of his early recording successes, later (comparative) failures, and subsequent career moves. None of this necessarily reflects what the man is capable of today. I firmly believe, for example, that there’s a lot more juice left in Mehta than in, say, Claudio Abbado or Bernard Haitink, two other conductors whose careers have been documented on disc from their beginnings and who are now finding themselves in a situation similar to Mehta’s.

One thing is certain: a career based on the success of early recordings can, in the long run, come back to haunt an artist. In the case of a conductor like Bernard Haitink, whose second (and third) versions of Mahler, Stravinsky, Bruckner, and Brahms are in general markedly inferior to his first efforts, this may not matter very much. Haitink more or less started at the top, with the London Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras, and so had nowhere to go but down. In any event, some conductors peak early and decline. Others actually get better (or at least more interesting) as they age. Mehta fits neither category. He belongs to a third, rather unusual group: conductors who offer consistency over time. They hardly change at all. This is particularly problematic when it comes to remaking recordings. It was foolish of Mehta and his record companies to do the same music over and over. His discography is full of tantalizing hints of what might have been. Those first rate versions of Nielsen’s Fourth, Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, and the Franz Schmidt Fourth Symphony–all represent avenues left unexplored. In live concerts, he has been a passionate and thrilling exponent of Messiaen. He’s a splendid opera conductor. What might he have done with Berg, Korngold, Rachmaninov, or Schrecker?

With our constant emphasis on continual “growth,” “improvement,” and “progress,” in all things artistic it’s easy to disparage consistency. The real issue, though, is whether one is consistently great, or consistently mediocre. In some music at least, Mehta has shown himself to be consistently excellent, and it would be incredibly ironic if the high quality of his early recordings should blind us to what he may yet do, both live and on disc.

David Hurwitz