(Wall Street Journal) Tunku Varadarajan - Zubin Mehta, 81, an Indian Zoroastrian, has been the musical director of the Israel Philharmonic orchestra for more than 50 years. "It started by chance," he says. "A great conductor, Eugene Ormandy, fell ill and couldn't do a series of concerts with the Israel Philharmonic in 1961. I was a jobless conductor in Vienna...and they called me to cover as a substitute." He recalls there was "an immediate good feeling between me and the orchestra. We hit it off, musically and spiritually. And I felt very at home in Israel....Their temperament is very much like India. They all talk at the same time. They're very opinionated, very argumentative, very hospitable." The writer is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
2017-11-17 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive