When Zubin Mehta first came to public attention in the late 1960s, the Los Angeles public relations machine, flamboyant then as now, saw to it that he was acclaimed in very much the way Gustavo Dudamel is today. Here was a darkly handsome, exotic heartthrob, arriving just in time to rescue musical excitement in America from the departure of Leonard Bernstein for foreign shores. A certain amount of "Zubie Baby!" razzmatazz surrounded Mehta from the beginning and affected the way he was reviewed. But this was a distraction from the seriousness the young conductor actually represented to listeners. Mehta was the first of a new generation of music directors who openly admired the evocative and flexible musicianship of Wilhelm Furtwängler — who endeavored to explain it to the public — and who tried to imitate it in practice.