Mehta befriends a Strauss rarity

It’s an occasion any time Zubin Mehta comes back to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the band he led from 1962 to 1978. Thursday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, he got a standing ovation from some patrons just by walking onstage.

A few hours later, at the end of his three-part program, almost everyone was standing and hollering. That’s the effect Mehta reliably has around the globe and especially in his hometown.

Some people -- OK, some critics -- are a bit immune. But there’s no denying that the kind of thing Mehta does well, including bringing to life an oddball work such as Strauss’ “Symphonia Domestica,� a paean to the composer’s family life, he does in inimitable style.

Where more insight and poetry are hoped for, as in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, which was also on the program, frustration can set in, even with an accomplished soloist such as 28-year-old German cellist Johannes Moser.

Discombobulating fans and critics alike, Mehta opened the program with a fine account of Webern’s austere Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, Opus 6.

Even relatively early Webern can rattle, however. When Mehta finished, his arms at his side, there was a very long pause before any applause. It seemed a safe bet that the audience was less transported than simply befuddled about whether the work was over.

A lion in winter, Mehta, 71, who has been music director of the Israel Philharmonic since 1969, appeared determined to barrel his way through the Dvorak, the composer’s most personal and confessional concerto. He favored brisk tempos, crisp attacks, rounded phrases with whip-like endings, huge dynamic accents and big climaxes.

He also had reseated the orchestra in its old configuration, with violins on the conductor’s left and violas, cellos and basses on his right. Perhaps because the change unsettled the players or because Mehta is relatively unfamiliar with the lively Disney Hall acoustic, balance problems occasionally arose, with inner, subsidiary voices matching or even overshadowing the soloist.

Moser, who made his debut with the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005, played with robust, vital attack, brilliant technique and outsized passion. Winner of the 12th Tchaikovsky Competition in 2002, at which he also earned a special prize for his interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo Variations,� Moser had no problem keeping up with the conductor’s propulsive approach.

Still, it was only with his single encore, a pensive, soft-spoken account of the Sarabande from Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello No. 1, that he revealed a poetic depth missing from the performance of the concerto. Perhaps if he hadn’t been so boxed in. . . .

If local records are correct, the last time the Philharmonic played Strauss’ “Symphonia Domestica� was in 1992, with Mehta also on the podium. Christof Perick had led the Philharmonic in the work a year earlier, and that had been revived especially for him.

Mostly, though, the piece has vanished from the repertory (there are few recordings), and it’s not hard to see why.

One wag called it a portrait of a family of mastodons. Famed German conductor Hans Richter said, “All the cataclysms of the downfall of the gods in burning Valhalla do not make a quarter of the noise of one Bavarian baby in his bath.�

Yet nobody has mastered the sweep, clarity and power of a large-scale Romantic orchestra as well as Strauss did. For all the risible portraits of squabbles between Papa and shrewish Mama, or Baby (Bubi Franz) protesting his bedtime, there are many glorious moments in this truncated 24-hour musical diary. These include a soaring love scene and a final heroic affirmation of the devotion between Strauss and his wife, Pauline.

Mehta conducted it all as if it were an immortal masterpiece, and sometimes you could believe it was.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 tonight, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $15 to $142

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or

www.laphil.com