TV REVIEW : Mehli Mehta ‘Documentary’ on KCET

Billed as a documentary by KCET Channel 28, where it airs tonight at 10, “Maestro Mehli Mehta and the American Youth Symphony” is actually a fund-raising video produced by Richard J. Frank, the orchestra’s director of development. In a press release, he calls it “a product to sell and license in perpetuity for television, home video sales and other markets which will create a new source of income for the orchestra.”

Inadvertently, the 60-minute tribute to one of L.A.’s longstanding classical music institutions even raises questions about the orchestra’s status as a role model for young musicians.

The program, hosted by Walter Matthau, mixes well-played excerpts from rehearsals and live concerts with endlessly positive comments by famous musicians and AYS members against an interesting chronicle of the 83-year-old Mehta’s adventurous life, from his early days as a violinist in Bombay.

The fact that 100 AYS graduates now play in orchestras around the world is impressive, but what dominates the show is a stream of platitudes (baritone Thomas Hampson saying, for example, “Mehta is one of the truly spiritual human beings on the face of the Earth”) that constitutes an appeal for support more than an illuminating statement about art or an objective evaluation of Mehta.

Worse, Mehta’s pride in using imported soloists for his annual benefit concerts must depress young musicians who want to remain in Los Angeles. The career musicians interviewed are all Establishment celebrities like Hampson, Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Midori, Lynn Harrell, Yehudi Menuhin, Wynton Marsalis and Marvin Hamlisch. And the conservative musical selections--including Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, Sibelius’ Second Symphony, Brahms’ Second Symphony--symbolize Mehta’s lack of curiosity about most music of the 20th Century.

Not surprisingly, the program’s most moving moment is its most ingenuous: Mehta sitting at home in an armchair like a grandfather, listening intently to Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” on headphones while he reads and conducts from the score.

The musical moments are mostly excellent, photographer Stephen Farrier’s expressive camera work vividly capturing Mehta’s fluent stick technique and intense scrutiny of the orchestra. In one incident, Mehta interrupts a sour patch of Sibelius and cries out in his quick, singsong cadence, “Before you start to play anything, you have to look at the key signature and the time signature. Without these two things, you are undressed, you are naked!”

Ultimately, however, the program says more about the marketing of music than about the making of it. Too bad, because any musician who can stop a rehearsal to say defiantly, “I have played most of the compositions written by this composer, so I know his language, I know his philosophy, I know his mind,” deserves respect.