The Next Toscanini?

Seldom has old Salzburg witnessed such an ovation. After the festival's opening concert last week, a capacity audience of 2,200 stamped, clapped and bravoed in a demonstration that verged on Beatlemania. One of the few in the hall who seemed unmoved by all the fuss was the man on the podium, hot-eyed, shock-haired Zubin Mehta, 28, the onetime boy wonder from Bombay who, in four years of conducting from Moscow to Montreal, has enjoyed one of the most spectacular ascents to fame in many a decade.

The peak of Mehta's career to date was his selection as lead-off conductor at Salzburg, where he has appeared for three straight years. With feet planted firmly apart, lithe, suavely handsome Mehta led the Berlin Philharmonic with driving energy through a varied program of works by Stravinsky, Mozart and Brahms, writhing and swaying, from heels to tiptoes, with the ebb and flow of the rhythms. Disdaining a score, he commanded a clean, precise beat with slashing strokes of his baton, winding his arm behind his head for broad, sweeping gestures like a pitcher unfurling a fastball, while his spidery left hand deftly drew out the secondary voices.

Mehta's performance did not charm the tough Salzburg press as much as it did the audience. To critical carping that his visually arresting style is designed to conduct the audience as well as the orchestra, Mehta replies coolly: "Intellectual snobs forget that showmanship is a great asset to the profession. We have to be able to bring certain things over to the public magnetically, and that requires acting."

Brainwashed. Whatever other talents he may have, Mehta is a natural, consummate performer. Back in North America, where he serves as conductor of both the Los Angeles and Montreal symphony orchestras, committee dowagers and women's magazines purr kittenishly about his "brutal charm" and "catnip gaze."

The only Indian conductor who has ever won international fame, Mehta allows that he was "brainwashed with classical music from the cradle." Urged on by his father, former conductor of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra and now a violinist with Philadelphia's Curtis String Quartet, he began studying the violin and piano at seven. At one period, he renounced music for medicine but soon relented. "Every time I sat down to write an exam or cut up a dogfish," he says, "there I was with a Brahms symphony running through my head." In 1958, after studying conducting for three years at Vienna's Academy of Music, he entered Britain's international conductors' competition at Liverpool, walked off with first prize. This launched him on a series of guest-conducting engagements throughout Europe. Back in the late 1950s, when the San Francisco Orchestra's conductor, Josef Krips, first heard Mehta in Vienna, he cried: "The next Toscanini has been born!"

Misfortune's Child. Mehta's big chance came during a whirlwind nine-month period in 1960-61 when half the world's first-rank conductors were struck with illness. Hopscotching between continents on a moment's notice, he became the leading understudy to a host of ailing maestros, winning high critical acclaim nearly everywhere he appeared. In 1961, after stellar subbing jobs in Los Angeles and Montreal, Mehta was named resident conductor with both cities' orchestras. At 24, he rejuvenated Montreal's faltering orchestra almost overnight, stretched its season from twelve to 26 weeks, more than trebled symphony subscribers, to some 10,000.

"I made "half my career by jumping in at the last moment," muses Mehta. "I sometimes think my success was due almost entirely to the misfortunes of my elderly colleagues." No more. Indeed, the "siraordinario maestro Indiano-inglese," as an Italian critic called him in July, served notice last week that he had finished "thinking about" his career and would now embark on a decade of "fulfillment." It promises to be some decade.

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