A different valor

Tel Aviv —  Zubin Mehta is yawning. The combined effects of jet lag and staying up to catch a lunar eclipse in the dead of night have left him bleary-eyed and a tad disheveled.

But somnolence quickly gives way to his characteristic ebullience when the maestro talks about his coming U.S. tour -- including stops this week in Los Angeles and Costa Mesa -- with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he holds the lofty title of music director for life.

“It has been a great orchestra for many years,” said Mehta, who first conducted it in 1961. As ambassadors for the Jewish state, “we are the best that Israel has. We are the positive face of Israel.”

That face has seldom been as important to this tiny country as it is now, when virtually all Israelis have felt the sting and fear of three years of turmoil. The Israel Philharmonic is no different.

The last time the orchestra visited L.A., Bill Clinton was president, Israelis and Palestinians were talking peace, and a breakthrough in the intractable Mideast conflict seemed tantalizingly possible.

But as the Philharmonic prepares to take the stage of Disney Hall on Wednesday for a sold-out performance -- becoming the second foreign orchestra to play there -- violence has killed close to 2,500 Palestinians and 900 Israelis since September 2000, a staggering toll in so small and densely populated an area.

While the world has watched in horror as Palestinian suicide bombers have blown up innocent civilians in buses and restaurants, Israel, for its part, has come under increasing condemnation for its aggressive occupation of the West Bank, where Israeli tanks and soldiers have isolated whole Palestinian cities and where more and more Jewish settlers are claiming land.

“Psychologically, they are affected as every Israeli is affected,” Mehta said of his players, talking backstage between rehearsals here one recent afternoon, the sun-dappled Mediterranean an easy walk from the auditorium. “Israel has been living in a state of war for 50 years, but these last few years ... have aggravated the situation, and the musicians feel it very strongly.”

So do the orchestra’s coffers. With the economy laid waste by the ongoing conflict, which has driven tourists away from the Holy Land in droves, the Israel Philharmonic is undergoing a severe financial crunch, including a potential deficit of $1 million. “We’ve never had that big a deficit before,” said Avi Shoshani, the orchestra’s secretary-general. Its concert in Los Angeles and one of two in New York are benefit performances to try to make up some of the anticipated shortfall. Violinist Pinchas Zuckerman will join it at Disney Hall for a program comprising the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka.” At the Orange County Performing Arts Center, it will perform both Schubert’s and Mahler’s sixth symphonies.

Budget woes

Adding to the orchestra’s woes, the cash-strapped Israeli government has served notice that it plans to slash its $2-million annual grant by as much as 40% next year, further reducing its share of the orchestra’s $15-million budget.

Mehta shakes his head at the decision, describing it as not just culturally unwise but politically shortsighted in light of the badly needed boost the Philharmonic gives Israel’s image abroad, countering headlines and photos of violent confrontation with sounds of beautiful, cooperatively produced music.

“People who come to the concerts go away enthralled. Some people might even feel closer to Israel, hopefully,” he said. “That’s why I feel the government should support our traveling. But they don’t.”

Subscriptions in Israel account for half the ensemble’s budget. But those too are down, from 36,000 in 1987 to 26,000 at present -- not bad in comparison with some European and U.S. orchestras, but not what they used to be. Although individual concerts can still pack them in here in Tel Aviv, especially when Mehta or “honorary guest conductor” Kurt Masur is in town, the Philharmonic now competes with a plethora of other sources of entertainment, from local opera and chamber music groups to movies and satellite TV.

In addition to choosy audiences, the orchestra has had to cope with a wave of no-shows by big-name artists. Last year, in the aftermath of a particularly brutal period of suicide bombings and Israeli military thrusts into the West Bank, a number of music stars canceled their scheduled appearances with the Philharmonic. Its concert presentation of “Salome” alone lost eight soloists, including British soprano Jane Eaglen.

Many of these musicians are honest about acknowledging security fears in their decision not to come. Others cite sudden scheduling conflicts, though some of the no-shows, orchestra officials suspect, are motivated by political reasons -- namely, opposition to Israeli policies. An Internet petition last year endorsed by more than 200 photographers, painters and poets urged their fellow artists to boycott Israel because “the art world must speak out against Israeli war crimes and atrocities.”

“We’ve become like an island,” said Peter Marck, a double-bass player and member of the orchestra’s management team. “We used to be the last stop in Europe. Now, many soloists and many conductors don’t want to touch us.”

Cancellations elicit different responses, depending on who is canceling.

“I go along with my Israeli colleagues,” said the Bombay-born Mehta, who was music director of the L.A. Philharmonic from 1962 to 1978 and still makes Los Angeles his home. “If that man says, ‘I don’t want to go [to Israel] at the moment,’ and he’s Jewish, we don’t take it very well. With non-Jews, we have no argument. We cannot oblige them to come.... Are we going to guarantee him his safety? We can’t do that.”

The orchestra’s own safety while abroad has become another issue -- and a drain on its resources. On tour, the band now employs four security officers, up from one or two in the past, because of increased threats to Israelis and potential Israeli targets worldwide.

The orchestra had to scrap a U.S. tour last year, including a stop at the Hollywood Bowl, because of ticket sales that the tour’s co-producer at the time said might have been influenced by fears of a terrorist attack. There were also reports that some insurers were hesitant to underwrite the event.

“The police in other countries can be hysterical, including bodyguards,” Marck said. “It’s not nice.”

This is, of course, an orchestra used to performing in tense situations -- indeed, one that has made it a point of pride to do so.

In 1947, the year before Israel was established, the then Palestine Orchestra played under the baton of Leonard Bernstein at the scene of the battle by Jewish fighters for the city of Beersheba in the Negev desert. Twenty years later, after Israel captured eastern Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six-Day War, Bernstein conducted a performance atop Mt. Scopus in that part of the city.

During the Persian Gulf War, in 1991, the musicians sat down to a concert, led by Mehta, with gas masks at hand. And last year, in a show of solidarity with residents of Jerusalem, the orchestra gave a performance in the parking lot of a Jerusalem open-air market often targeted by suicide bombers.

“The audience kept coming in the darkest days” of the Palestinian uprising, Marck said, “when restaurants were completely empty, shopping malls were completely empty.... The orchestra gave them, not an escape, but a few moments of sanity, with the sirens going on outside.”

Outreach program

The ensemble is as well known for its internal scrappiness as for the brave face it shows the outside world. Its rehearsals are reputed to be feisty affairs, argumentative and passionate, with strong personalities and ideas igniting sparks. Yet the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raging around them, which has polarized much of Israeli society, has not caused similar dissension within the orchestra, members say. Any division that exists tends to cleave along ethnic lines -- between the Israelis and the Russians and other players from former Soviet bloc countries, who compose a substantial minority of the 106-member orchestra -- rather than along lines drawn by the political situation.

Then again, there are no Israeli Arabs or Palestinians in the orchestra’s ranks, mirroring the general split in Israeli society between Jews and Arabs, whose mutual distrust has only hardened over three years of intifada.

To help bridge the gap, the Israel Philharmonic’s education department created the Jewish/Arab Ensemble, featuring three of the orchestra’s Jewish musicians and four Arab Israeli musicians from northern Israel. An outgrowth of a joint concert in Jerusalem four years ago, the group performs mostly in schools, for Jewish and Arab children, and appeared at the annual music festival in Tanglewood, Mass., in 2001 and at Carnegie Hall last year.

The experience has been a salutary one for Marck, one of the ensemble’s members, who had never before been on familiar terms with an Israeli Arab, despite having moved to Israel from Milwaukee 27 years ago.

“We don’t bother with politics. We don’t bother with background, with preconceived notions. It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “We’re just professional musicians playing with professional musicians, putting programs together. We play their music. They play our music.”

After one school performance, “one of the kids went up to one of the musicians and said, ‘Are you a good Arab or a bad Arab?’ He said, ‘Well, listen to me play, and then you decide,’ ” Marck said. “It was a very touching thing.”

Peaceful coexistence between different peoples is possible, Mehta insists, but only if the will is there. The Israel Philharmonic’s Jewish/Arab Ensemble, of which he is a big supporter, is proof.

“They are friends. It is possible to be friends. It is possible -- if you want to,” Mehta said. “You have to want to live together.”

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Israel Philharmonic Orchestra

When: Wednesday, 7 p.m.

Where: Disney Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

Price: $35-$150 (sold out)

Contact: (323) 850-2000

Also

When: Thursday, 8 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

Price: $30-$90

Contact: (714) 556-2787