Conductors: Gypsy Boy

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under his hot-eyed glance. To his chagrin, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has even outfitted its ushers in Indian-style caps and silk coats like sherwanis. He is also somewhat embarrassed by the oversized portrait of himself, painted by Marion Pike, that hangs in the lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion near the bar; but, typically, Mehta says, "Well, I'll say one thing: the bar makes a lot of money since that portrait was put up."

Many people disapprove of what Los Angeles Times Music Critic Martin Bernheimer calls the "climate of adulation" in which Mehta moves. But misguided as all the glamorization may be, it is still a tribute to the galvanizing impact of Mehta's performances.

On the podium, he possesses an innately theatrical flair, miming the emotions of the music, sculpturing the shape of a composition in the air with gracefully masculine gestures. "I can feel the audience through my back as if I were facing them," he says, and he is the first to admit that some of his gyrations are for the audience's benefit. "For a cymbal crash, the player will come in anyway, but if I give a big gesture, it just adds to the high point. Or in the development section of Beethoven's Eroica symphony, I'm not sure the audience is hearing everything—the different modulations, the canonic effects. I point to the orchestra as if to say 'Look who is playing. Now the theme is in the first violins; now it is in the basses.' "

Primary Spark. Yet Mehta's motions are by no means shallow showmanship. They help make his performance "live all the time," in the words of Met Tenor Nicolai Gedda, who sings under Mehta in Carmen. Says Gedda: "He does not drag and he does not rush; he has the kind of pulse that is absolutely right." This is Mehta's essence as a musician: an instinct for the living pulse of a piece of music, along with a molten core of romantic feeling and a point-of-no-return commitment.

He has a young man's affinity for bold, large-scale works—especially from the late 19th and early 20th centuries —that glow with color and abound with dramatic contrasts. His concern is not detail but sweep and sound. He hears music with his nerve ends more than with his intellect. For this reason, he is less assured when he traces the transparent architecture of Mozart and Bach, or unfolds the subtle poetry of Schubert. Yet these are not fatal flaws in a conductor of his age. What is important is that he has the right foundation to build on. The visceral spark is primary; the intellect and poetry can come later. Without the root intuition, the other qualities would never fully bloom.

Mehta's qualities at this point are more than enough to put him in the forefront of today's young conductors, but he is not alone. "Look at our generation!" he says, affecting, as he often does, the royal first-person-plural pronoun. "We've got competition."

Indeed "they" have, all the way from such solidly schooled, well-established figures as the Minneapolis Symphony's Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, 44, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw's Bernard Haitink, 38, down to such newer personalities as the Houston Symphony's André Previn, 38, and the Met's Thomas Schippers, 37. At the top is a crack cadre of gifted conductors who,