By Frank Cadenhead [Opera Today, 17 April 2012]

Tenor Johan Botha had just started carving his steak when his phone rang. A director of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was on the line with an emergency request. On March 29, at the famed Musikvereinsaal, Zubin Mehta and the Munich Philharmonic were to set to begin the concert’s second half, the imposing Das Lied von der Erde of Gustav Mahler.