Music : Beethoven, Bartok Works Open ’92 for L.A. Philharmonic

Good vibes--but certainly no vibraphones--marked the final program in Zubin Mehta’s three-week guest-conducting engagement with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a characteristic Mehta agenda devoted to works by Beethoven and Bartok with which he has been associated over the years.

Friday night, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mehta took this program--which surrounded Bartok’s suite from “A csodalatos mandarin” (The Wonderful Mandarin) with Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony and Violin Concerto--conducted it with authority and affection, and created a triumph for himself, for violin soloist Pinchas Zukerman and, most important, for the composers.

The surprise was not the brilliance, kaleidoscopic range and revelatory solo-playing the Philharmonic players displayed in the ballet suite; they have done that, under former music director Mehta as well as others, for decades now. It was the mellowness and understatement shown by all in the Eighth Symphony and the utter, effortless mastery that marked their playing of the concerto.

One need not have expected less. Opus 93 has long been a specialty of this conductor, though one remembers his reading as more bumptious, more coarse, and a lot louder than this time around. For all its rhythmic solidity and rhetorical thrust, this performance seemed basically a thoughtful reconsideration of the work’s outward qualities: in short, a rethinking, by a mature artist, of a formerly impetuous approach.

The Violin Concerto, which has been played numerous times in this hall since the first time 27 years and one month ago (when Jascha Heifetz, Mehta and the Philharmonic opened the Music Center with it), found the two longtime colleagues Zukerman and Mehta in complete rapport with each other and with the work, to its glory.

Because Zukerman spends so much time these days conducting, and as a soloist turns up as often playing the viola as the violin, it may be easy for some to forget that he remains a virtuoso fiddler with few peers. This performance--elegant of line, style-honest, technically immaculate--served as a reminder.

It may not have been definitive--there are many more humors in the finale than Zukerman brought out, for instance--but it revealed his characteristic, sometimes overlooked, probity and vision. The orchestra seconded him wholeheartedly in the natural climax to a cumulatively satisfying evening.