#Zubin Mehta

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Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, Zubin Mehta, Marechiare

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Daniel Barenboim plays Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor, Op.23 (2012) Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by Zubin Mehta

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Zubin Mehta.

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Zubin Mehta - Star Wars And Close Encounters (1978)

Cover by Page Wood

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After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.

Zubin Mehta

For more than 60 years, Zubin Mehta has been at the top of his profession. He was head of some of some of the world’s greatest orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the Bavarian State Opera. But at 87 years old, The Indian Parsee born Zubin Mehta is getting frail. Music lovers should treasure him as he is alas one of the last of an important generation of Viennese trained conductors that included his classmate Claudio Abbado.

Photo: Mehata conducts the Staatsoper Berlin during a performance of Wagner and Bruckner, 9 July 2023.

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My Sunday morning classical music. The combination of flute and harp makes this piece ethereal and almost magical.

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July 10, 2024

By Tim Grieving

Before John Williams believed in himself as a conductor, the general manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic believed in him.

Ernest Fleischmann was a savvy and powerful impresario, born in Germany in 1924, raised in South Africa to escape the Nazis, a frustrated conductor and journalist who managed the London Symphony Orchestra for eight years and ran the European classical division of CBS Records before coming to Los Angeles in 1969 and transforming a “provincial second-rank orchestra,” as L.A. Times critic Mark Swed wrote, “into one of the world’s best.”...

... When Fleischmann saw Star Wars with his kids on opening weekend in the summer of 1977, he thought to himself: God, this score! “It’s really the score and the sound effects that have made that movie what it was,” he later said. “It was almost Wagnerian.” The LA Phil was scheduled to tour Japan that fall, but the tour was canceled at the last minute when the promoter went bankrupt. With his orchestra suddenly freed up, and Star Wars totally consuming the culture, Fleischmann saw a plum opportunity; he paid a visit to John Williams’ Brentwood home and asked the composer if the LA Phil could perform music from Star Wars in a concert of space-themed music. Williams said “Fantastic,” and created a special 28-minute suite from his already super-famous, record-breaking score.

The resulting concert on November 20th, 1977 at the Hollywood Bowl—the iconic outdoor summer home of the LA Phil—was a galactic party designed for young families, complete with a laser light show and readings by William Shatner. The sold-out audience went crazy for it, but the event also highlighted the deep tension between anointed priests of “high culture” and the hoi polloi. “We were criticized very heavily,” recalled Zubin Mehta, the LA Phil’s music director who conducted that night. “Our critics and colleagues said that we had sold our souls to Hollywood. It was really a children’s concert.” The grumpy L.A. Times critic Martin Bernheimer called it “artistic prostitution.”

Fleischmann didn’t care. He had the LA Phil repeat the “Music from Outer Space” program at the California Angels’ baseball stadium in nearby Anaheim, and he commissioned an album of the Star Wars suite and Williams’ new Close Encounters suite, recorded at UCLA’s Royce Hall in December 1977 by Mehta and the orchestra. According to veteran classical music broadcaster Jim Svejda, it was the first time a major American orchestra treated film music “in a very serious way. I think it made a very dramatic statement.”

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Zappa & Zubin Mehta

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Zubin Mehta: Suites From Star Wars And Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1978)

Featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra

Recorded December 1977 in Royce Hall, UCLA

London Records

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Currently Playing

John Knowles Paine SYMPHONY NO. 2

Zubin Mehta New York Philharmobic

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Asian Conductors

Asian conductors have made significant contributions in the classical music world for many years. Kent Nagano and Tadaaki Otawa (Japan) and Myung-Whun Chung (South Korea) among others. In this edition of In Conversation we look at two titans of the classical stage whose impact has been immense for close on fifty years. However, a new generation of talent is immerging so we pick two conductors who…

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Going to Naples and Sorrento - on an Italian opera trail.

Watching Mount Vesuvius from Sorrento, across the Bay of Naples, I thought of Pliny the Younger (born 61 AD), as you do, who wrote a detailed description of the catastrophic eruption of the volcano (79 AD) that killed his uncle, the great Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, who sailed into the disaster because he was interested in the science of volcanoes. Pliny the younger watched the destruction…

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Martha Argerich plays Schumann - Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 Vienna Philharmonic Conducted By Zubin Mehta

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Zubin Mehta is back in Mumbai to perform for the first time with the Symphony Orchestra of India

After arriving in Mumbai earlier this week, celebrated conductor Zubin Mehta has spent a good amount of time on stage. He has been rehearsing with the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), with whom he is performing for the first time. “I am quite impressed with the musicians I have interacted with,” he says. Zubin will conduct two shows at the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre on August 19 and 21. The line up…

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Luciano Pavarotti sings "Nessun dorma" from Turandot (The Three Tenors in Concert 1994)

Renowned Italian tenor Pavarotti (1935–2007) sings the aria from the final act of Puccini's opera Turandot, live in concert with The Three Tenors in Los Angeles in 1994. Watch the full performance, newly available in digital video: https://w.lnk.to/The3TenorsLY

The Three Tenors (José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti) are joined by conductor Zubin Mehta, the L.A. Philharmonic, and the L.A. Music Center Opera Chorus.

A Tibor Rudas production.

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Happy 89th birthday to Nancy Kovack!

Kovack played the female lead, bad girl Sophie Renault, opposite Mike Henry in “Tarzan and the Valley of Gold” (1966).

Born Nancy Diane Kovach on March 11, 1935, in Flint, Michigan, she attended the University of Michigan and worked as a radio announcer while winning a series of beauty contests. Kovack then moved to New York, where she worked as one of Jackie Gleason’s “Glea Girls” and served as a presenter on “Beat the Clock”, and as an anchorwoman on “Today” and for “The Dave Garroway Show”, while earning extra money through modeling and commercials.

A role on Broadway in “The Disenchanted” (1958-59) led to a Columbia Pictures contract, and her film debut, “Strangers When We Meet” (1960). Additional big-screen credits include “Cry for Happy” (1960), “The Wild Westerners” (1962), “Diary of a Madman” (1963), “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), “The Outlaws Is Coming” (1965), “Sylvia” (1965), “The Great Sioux Massacre” (1965), “Frankie and Johnny” (1966), “The Silencers” (1966), “Enter Laughing” (1967), and “Marooned” (1969). On television, she appeared in popular series like “12 O’Clock High,” “Burke’s Law,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “Batman,” “Perry Mason,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” “I Spy,” “Star Trek,” “The F.B.I.,” “Family Affair,” “Get Smart,” “Bewitched,” “Mannix,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Get Smart,” “Bronk,” and “Cannon.”

Following her marriage to Los Angeles and New York Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Zubin Mehta, Kovack retired from acting.