TOKYO — Seiji Ozawa, the Japanese conductor who amazed audiences with the lithe physicality of his performances throughout three many years on the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has died, his administration workplace stated Friday, Feb. 9. He was 88.
The internationally acclaimed maestro, together with his trademark mop of salt-and-pepper hair, led the BSO from 1973 to 2002, longer than some other conductor within the orchestra’s historical past. From 2002 to 2010, he was the music director of the Vienna State Opera.
He died of coronary heart failure Tuesday, Feb. 6, at his dwelling in Tokyo, in accordance with his workplace, Veroza Japan.
He remained lively in his later years, notably in his place of origin. He was the creative director and founding father of the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Competition, a music and opera pageant in Japan. He and the Saito Kinen Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1984, received the Grammy for greatest opera recording in 2016 for Ravel’s “L’Enfant et Les Sortileges (The Baby and the Spells.)”
In 2022, he carried out his Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Competition for the primary time in three years to mark its thirtieth anniversary. That turned out to be his final public efficiency.
That yr, Ozawa additionally carried out the Saito Kinen Orchestra to ship Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture dwell to Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata on the Worldwide House Station. The occasion was co-organized with the Japan Aerospace and Exploration Company, simply because the world was divided by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Music can hyperlink the hearts of individuals — transcending phrases, borders, faith, and politics. It’s my hope that by way of music, we will be reminded that we’re the entire identical human race residing on the identical planet. And that we’re united,” Ozawa stated in an announcement.
Ozawa exerted huge affect over the BSO throughout his tenure. He appointed 74 of its 104 musicians and his movie star attracted well-known performers together with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. He additionally helped the symphony turn into the biggest-budget orchestra on the earth, with an endowment that grew from lower than $10 million within the early Nineteen Seventies to greater than $200 million in 2002.
When Ozawa carried out the Boston orchestra in 2006 — 4 years after he had left — he obtained a hero’s welcome with an almost six-minute ovation.
Ozawa was born Sept. 1, 1935, to Japanese mother and father in Manchuria, China, whereas it was underneath Japanese occupation.
After his household returned to Japan in 1944, he studied music underneath Hideo Saito, a cellist and conductor credited with popularizing Western music in Japan. Ozawa revered him and shaped the Saito Kinen (Saito Memorial) Orchestra in 1984 and eight years later based the Saito Kinen Competition — renamed the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Competition in 2015.
Ozawa first arrived in america in 1960 and was shortly hailed by critics as a superb younger expertise. He attended the Tanglewood Music Heart and was observed by Leonard Bernstein, who appointed him assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic for the 1961-62 season. After his New York debut with the Philharmonic at age 25, the New York Instances stated “the music got here brilliantly alive underneath his path.”
Ozawa held management posts on the Ravinia Competition in Chicago and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra earlier than changing into music director of the San Francisco Symphony in 1970. His Beatles haircut and trademark love beads introduced a brand new degree of common attraction to the orchestra, and Ozawa expanded the repertoire to incorporate music by such residing masters as Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Toru Takemitsu.
However in 1972, San Francisco patrons and musicians had been startled to study that Ozawa had accepted a proposal to turn into the music director of the Boston Symphony — and that he meant to carry each positions concurrently. Orchestra members realized of this improvement from an merchandise in Newsweek.
“It’s Boston AND S.F. for Ozawa,” learn a headline within the Chronicle after Ozawa canceled a rehearsal with the Philadelphia Orchestra to fly dwelling and deal with the San Francisco Symphony musicians.
From 1973 to 1976, Ozawa carried out each orchestras, however there was by no means any doubt that Boston was his precedence. When he introduced his departure from San Francisco, Chronicle critic Robert Commanday wrote, “The truth that this was no shock didn’t reduce the sense of letdown and confusion.”
On the time there have been few nonwhite musicians on the worldwide scene. Ozawa embraced the problem and it grew to become his lifelong ardour to assist Japanese performers display they might be first-class musicians. In his 1967 ebook “The Nice Conductors,” critic Harold C. Schonberg famous the altering ranks of youthful conductors, writing that Ozawa and Indian-born Zubin Mehta had been the primary Asian conductors “to impress one as altogether main skills.”
Ozawa had appreciable star high quality and crossover attraction in Boston, the place he was a well known fan of the Crimson Sox and Patriots sports activities groups. In 2002, Catherine Peterson, govt director of Arts Boston, a nonprofit group that markets Boston’s arts, instructed the Related Press that “for most individuals on this group, Seiji personifies the Boston Symphony.”
Ozawa is basically credited with elevating the Tanglewood Music Heart, a music academy in Lenox, Massachusetts, to worldwide prominence. In 1994, a 1,200-seat, $12 million music corridor on the heart was named for him.
His work at Tanglewood was not with out controversy. In 1996, as music director of the orchestra and its final authority, he determined to maneuver the revered academy in new instructions. Ozawa ousted Leon Fleisher, the longtime director of Tanglewood, and several other outstanding lecturers stop in protest.
Regardless of glowing evaluations for his performances in Europe and Japan, American critics had been more and more disillusioned within the later years of his tenure with the BSO. In 2002, Anthony Tommasini of the New York Instances wrote that Ozawa had turn into, after a daring begin, “an embodiment of the entrenched music director who has misplaced contact.”
Lots of the orchestra’s musicians agreed and even circulated an anti-Ozawa e-newsletter claiming he had worn out his welcome in Boston. However the metropolis, marking his eighty fifth birthday in 2020, introduced it designated Sept. 1 as Seiji Ozawa Day.
Ozawa received two Emmy awards for TV work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the primary in 1976 for the BSO’s PBS collection “Night at Symphony” and the second in 1994, for Particular person Achievement in Cultural Programming, for “Dvorak in Prague: A Celebration.”
Ozawa held honorary doctorates of music from the College of Massachusetts, the New England Conservatory of Music, and Wheaton Faculty in Norton, Mass. He was considered one of 5 honorees on the annual Kennedy Heart Honors in 2015 for contributing to American tradition by way of the humanities.
In later years, Ozawa’s well being deteriorated. He canceled some appearances in 2015-16 for well being causes, together with what would have been his first return to the Tanglewood music pageant — the summer season dwelling of the Boston symphony — in a decade.
Messages of condolence poured in from all over the world, together with orchestras in Vienna and Berlin, musicians and residents of Matsumoto.
“The Boston Symphony Orchestra remembers Maestro Ozawa not solely as a legendary conductor, but in addition as a passionate mentor for future generations of musicians, generously providing his time to training and grasp lessons,” the symphony stated in an announcement.
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra Chairman Daniel Froschauer stated in his remark posted on X, previously Twitter, that Ozawa “has left a terrific creative legacy with the Vienna Philharmonic. We’ll sorely miss Seiji Ozawa as a pal and musical companion. Our ideas are together with his household.”
Japanese maestro Yutaka Sado, who studied underneath Ozawa and Leonard Bernstein and now serves the music director on the Tokyo-based New Japan Philharmonic, which Ozawa based, instructed NHK public tv that Ozawa was the one who impressed him to be a conductor. “I’ve stored following his again, however I might by no means meet up with him regardless of how laborious I attempted.”
Ozawa’s administration workplace stated his funeral was attended solely by shut kin as his household wished to have a quiet farewell.
Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman contributed to this report.
