By HERBERT KUPFERBERG

ZUBIN MEHTA SAYS he began to read MUSICAL AMERICA as a youngster in Bombay. “My father studied with Ivan Galamian, you know.” he says, “and the magazine was always in the house. But I never thought I’d be on the cover. As a matter of fact. I never thought I’d be music director of the New York Philharmonic.”

Both of these happy eventualities have now come to pass. Mr. Mehta became boss of the Philharmonic in 1978, having lived down the celebrated passage at arms eleven years earlier in which he cavalierly dismissed the orchestra as one to which you would only send your “worst enemy.” And now he attains the cover of MUSICAL AMERICA’s 1980 Directory of the Performing Arts as Musician of the Year.

It is a selection that will be welcomed by audiences in more than one country. At forty-three, Mehta is a leading member of a generation of conductors that will dominate the scene for the next two or three decades. And perhaps more than any he has displayed outstanding abilities not only as a musician of superb technique and deep sympathies, but a performer who exerts a powerful pull on an audience.

True. Mehta has long projected an image as one of the glamor boys of the baton, one who manages, whether by design or not, to achieve frequent media exposure. But having a charismatic personality has never been an impediment to generating musical excitement. Audiences respond to Mehta not because of any personal flamboyance (his podium style actually is quite restrained) but because he knows how to get the utmost out of an orchestra and to make concert-going an exhilarating experience. He has a particular affinity for the big romantic works to which the majority of today’s listeners relate most warmly. Wherever he has gone he has proved a popular favorite, and supposedly jaded New York has been no exception, as witness the upsurge in Philharmonic subscriptions that followed his advent.

“Audiences in Europe may be more outwardly responsive than American audiences,” he says, “but there isn’t much difference between audiences in New York and Los Angeles. The big difference I find is between subscription audiences and those that buy tickets for a specific concert. Non-subscription audiences psych themselves for that particular program, and it shows in their response. But I like the subscription audiences1you feel they’re a group of people who are basically on your side. You’re on your home court, so to speak. Even on Friday afternoon, with the ladies who chatter until the downbeat, you feel you’re playing for friends.”

“I like to experiment, to do different things. The first subscription concert I ever gave with the Vienna Philharmonic I had scheduled Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. The concertmaster told me: ‘We don’t like this piece very much, can you take it off?’ I said: ‘If you take it off, find another conductor.’ So we played it, though without the concertmaster. He said his arm hurt, or something.

“But it’s a fallacy to think that only the public likes the classics. Musicians like them, too. After all, that’s what interested us in music in the first place. I must say, though, that the New York Philharmonic is better than some other orchestras when it comes to welcoming contemporary music. They play the most difficult pieces uncomplainingly. As for audiences, the place where they are hardest on the moderns is Israel. There when you play a modern piece, you go off the stage in silence. That can be very embarrassing, especially when the composer is following you.”

Mehta, who is the son of Mehli Mehta, founder of the Bombay Symphony, received his basic conductorial training at the Vienna Conservatory of Music under Hans Swarowsky. His first exposure to America came in the pleasant purlieu of Tanglewood in the summer of 1958, when he shared top conducting honors with his fellow student Claudio Abbado.

There followed one of the more spectacular ascents in recent conductorial history, for at the age of twenty-four Mehta was named director of the Montreal Symphony, which he swiftly raised to full professional stature, and a year later he was appointed to head the Los Angeles Philharmonic which, during a sixteen-year-tenure, he put firmly on the national musical map. In 1961 he began his musical collaboration with the Israel Philharmonic, a close association he continues to cherish. He has also conducted extensively in opera, including six seasons at the Metropolitan and he currently has one Ring cycle underway and another in preparation, though unfortunately both are in Europe.

Now in the prime of his musical life, Mehta last May signed a contract extending his tenure at the New York Philharmonic through the 1985-86 season. His head is brimming with ideas about expanding audiences, making better use of television, and—particularly close to his heart— creating new educational opportunities for minority musicians. Many conductors become less innovative as they grow older, but as he outlines his plans, Mehta seems ready—as he has all his life—to move in directions distinctively his own.

“I’m not a man of the establishment,” he remarked during a conversation in the board room of the Philharmonic in Avery Fisher Hall. “But musical life in today’s big cities is so geared to tradition that I’ve learned to live with it. You have to accept things like the subscription system or the master contract of the orchestra, much as you might like to make changes in both. In the long run, maybe you’re better off with the present system. It’s like choosing between democracy and totalitarianism—some things I might not like about democracy, but I certainly prefer it to totalitarianism.”

At that moment, the door of the board room opened, and a cleaning woman stood poised on the threshold with a pail and other tools of the trade. She was asked whether she might come back a bit later.

“Well,” she replied, “I may not be able to get back here later today, and that means this room won’t get done till next week.” And so saying she determinedly gathered her equipment and departed.

“Now that,” said the Musician of the Year triumphantly, “is democracy.”