Music: Musical Chairs for the Maestros

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From New York to Los Angeles, batons are changing hands

It goes in spurts. For years major U.S. orchestras are under the baton of an established conductor. Then one or two podiums open up, and suddenly a game of musical chairs is under way. Right now that game has never been livelier. Antal Dorati has taken over in Detroit, leaving Washington, D.C.'s National Symphony to Mstislav Rostropovich. St. Louis has plucked young American Leonard Slatkin from New Orleans. San Francisco selected Edo de Waart from Rotterdam, after Seiji Ozawa relinquished that post to concentrate on his other job in Boston. Minnesota has grabbed two top Europeans: Britain's Neville Marriner as music director and Germany's Klaus Tennstedt as principal guest conductor. Los Angeles is easily the high roller in the game. It has captured Carlo Maria Giulini, 64, an Italian who is considered a master among maestros—but after having lost Zubin Mehta, 42, to New York.

The Mehta move was the grandest, most publicized stroke of all: his appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic to succeed avant-garde composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. Not everyone in New York was delighted. Boulez had been a cool, ascetic leader. Mehta, by comparison, had a reputation for more gloss than substance. There was the question of his repertoire, which stressed Tchaikovsky and Strauss to the detriment of the early classics. Finally there was his famous contretemps with the Philharmonic. In 1967 he enraged the New Yorkers by reportedly declaring that his own Los Angeles Philharmonic was better, that New York musicians were an ornery bunch, and that he wasn't interested in succeeding Leonard Bernstein, who was about to retire.

Mehta has yet to conduct a subscription concert—the first will be next week—and he is proceeding cautiously in his new town. But his celebrated gaffe, at least, is "practically forgotten, from the time I was a guest conductor in 1974," says Mehta. "That was when I went on the stage and apologized." He is now very glad to be in New York. "New York is the center of the musical world, and I felt that I should move there now rather than at age 55 or so," he says.

His new musicians are equally happy. Says Concertmaster Rodney Friend: "There's a feeling in the orchestra of the beginning of a very exciting and productive period." Others feel that Mehta is an antidote to Boulez's astringency, and that he will bring back some of the fire of the Bernstein days. "Boulez was not trying to reach the audience with spontaneous feeling, or luscious phrasing," says Violinist Oscar Ravina. "We'll be coming closer to that kind of thing with Mehta."

That positive start shows in Mehta's first rehearsals. He radiates pent-up emotion that electrifies the orchestra. In certain lyrical passages, as in Prokofiev's Suite from "Romeo and Juliet, " he almost stops conducting, falling into a dreamy, swimming motion. At more dramatic moments, however, he will step smartly forward, as if charging directly into the music. Startled, the players give him the taut line that he wants.