It is always interesting to watch a rehearsal in progress‚ all the more so when the orchestra in question is approaching the music for the first time. For many years the Israel Philharmonic refused to play Richard Strauss because of his links with the Nazis and this‚ filmed in 1996‚ is their first encounter with Till Eulenspiegel. It is an untypical first rehearsal‚ therefore; perhaps in other circumstances Mehta would not have felt it necessary to give the orchestra a sort of seminar on the work’s structure‚ the whole derived (as he says rather too often) from transformations of the two opening themes. It is a rather tense rehearsal too. The principal horn‚ James Cox‚ clearly familiar with the work no doubt from playing it with other orchestras‚ talks interestingly about the difficulties of his opening solo‚ but then explodes into real nervous anger when startled by a false entry from the timpanist. A flautist is at one point baffled by an instruction from Mehta‚ but when he clarifies the point the camera then focuses on a quite different player; Mehta has to explain in a voice­over that several musicians are being tried out for the position of first flute. Watching him insist on strict tempo (at one point ensuring precision by playing a passage through at half­speed) is interesting‚ but the comments and questions fom the orchestra are not always clearly audible. A complete performance is included after the edited extracts from the rehearsal‚ but it is a fairly scrappy one: Mehta is seen (and heard) commenting on flaws of balance and wrong entries as he listens back to the tape on headphones. The performance has rather tiresomely jocular narrative captions to each section (‘Till has really got it bad…’) and an unpleasasant filming device is used whereby trombonists’ faces advance and recede as though the camera were mounted at the sliding end of the instrument. Not as valuable an insight into the rehearsal process as it could have been.