Bejun Mehta in the Konzerthaus: sounds you can touch

It’s not easy for a singer who wants to accompany himself at the conductor’s podium. Unlike a conducting pianist, he has to turn to the orchestra on the podium to tact and to the audience in the hall to sing, so that the voice can unfold its full effect. That means turning while making music, a certain restlessness.

Beautiful on the outside, devil on the inside

Bejun Mehta, the well-known and versatile singer, courageously dares to take on this task and interprets the Bach cantata “Resist but the Sin” with the Konzerthausorchester. It is about the double character of sin, which is “beautiful on the outside” but is of the devil on the inside. The composition begins with harsh dissonance, and Mehta conducts energetically in order to paint the contrast in the music in the recitative: “From the outside gold” stands in contrast, completely “whitewashed grave”, in uncanny harmony.

With the small orchestra (strings and continuo only) carefully following him as he grasps the phrases with his hands, the feat of fresh rendition succeeds. His countertenor blossoms even more gracefully in a funeral music by Melchior Hoffmann, which has made it into Bach’s catalog raisonné as a doubted BWV 53.

But Bejun Mehta, a grand-nephew of conductor Zubin Mehta, has also dedicated himself to the baton for the past few years. He calls it a return because he was involved in orchestras as a young cellist. Now he first turns to composers with whom he was able to gain experience as a vocal soloist: Bach and Mozart. While he impresses with courageous flexibility in the D major overture by Johann Sebastian Bach, with the overture to “Mitridate” he shows above all that he can convey clear tempo ideas to the musicians.

He made his Salzburg debut as a countertenor in 2005 with the Mozart opera. Since then he has been a regular guest at the leading opera houses in the world and fascinates the audience not only with his throat gold, also on solo evenings. Because as a singing interpreter he is familiar with the affects of baroque music and its embellishments. The voice captivates not only with its radiance. Mehta has an enchanting legatissimo. At the Berlin State Opera he embodied Gluck’s Orfeo under Daniel Barenboim.

But now he appears in the Konzerthaus as a conductor of purely instrumental music and, in this leading role, amazes even his fans as a musician of captivating creative independence. The surge of applause reflects the audience’s surprise. Mehta differentiates the cantabileity of the homogeneous string groups in Mozart’s A major youth symphony, combines the quaver movements after the octave leaps into soft arcs, and sensitively guides virtuoso runs through their modulations. The music is filled with an inner tension.

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