Richard Strauss may have written himself into the score as its protagonist, but the real hero of any performance of the composer's "Ein Heldenleben" ("A Hero's Life") is the conductor and his orchestra. In their performance of the piece Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Center, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director, Zubin Mehta, covered themselves with glory.
This warhorse is one of the great tests of any conductor and orchestra; it is long, demanding to play and hard to hold together. And while "Heldenleben" has long been one of Mehta's specialties, it is scarcely a chestnut to the Israeli players. The current season is the first in which performances of Strauss, whose initial cooperation with the Third Reich's hatemongers has made him no hero in Israel, have been permitted. The Israel Philharmonic began programming "Heldenleben" last fall, and Tuesday's performance was the first in the United States.
"Heldenleben's" freshness to these players must have played a part in a performance of the music that made it seem as if the ink were still wet on the page. There was nothing routine -- whether in the niggling and backbiting winds that represent the composer's despised critics, the ardent love music that characterizes the composer's wife, the contrapuntal conflict of the great battle scene or the peaceful benediction of the coda. While not always immaculate, the playing was never less than affectingly warm, sensuous and passionate.
But the real hero was Mehta himself. It's hard to think of another conductor who shapes this music with as much authority and drama. From the opening, with its long-breathed melody hurled defiantly upward six times, to the golden-toned rapture of the close, the conductor's compelling narrative grip yielded a performance that was brilliant, swaggering and utterly without bombast.
On the program's first half, Mehta and the orchestra joined the violinist Midori in Bruch's G Minor Concerto. In the past, this ex-prodigy, now 25, sometimes seemed to commune only with her instrument, producing performances that were refined into a chaste and airy insubstantiality. But if this performance was any indication, Midori, who has recently returned to the concert stage after an extended sabbatical, has acquired interpretive depth that matches her virtuosity. This intense and heartfelt performance spilled out of heretofore unsuspected emotional depths.
The concert opened with the U.S. premiere of Ari Ben-Shabetai's "Sinfonia Chromatica," a work for large orchestra that the young Israeli composer likens in a program note to Scriabin's experiments in orchestral color. Except for a wonderful English horn melody, the first movement sounded undistinguished. But the second movement, an ingeniously driving scherzo, and the final one, which resolves into glowing, almost Straussian warmth, clearly marks Ben-Shabetai as a composer to watch.