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Seiji Ozawa, the high-spirited Japanese conductor who took the Western classical music world by storm within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s after which led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for nearly 30 years, died on Tuesday at his dwelling in Tokyo. He was 88.
The trigger was coronary heart failure, in line with an announcement launched on Friday by Veroza, his administration workplace.
Mr. Ozawa had skilled years of well being issues starting in early 2010, when he was recognized with esophageal most cancers. He by no means absolutely rebounded from most cancers surgical procedure or from again issues that have been made worse throughout his restoration. He was later hospitalized with coronary heart valve illness.
Mr. Ozawa was probably the most outstanding harbinger of a motion that has remodeled the classical music world over the past half-century: an incredible inflow of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in flip helped unfold the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.
For a lot of that point, a widespread prejudice even amongst educated critics held that though extremely educated Asian musicians may develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they may by no means obtain an actual understanding of its interpretive wants or a deep feeling for its emotional content material. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this by dint of his outsize persona, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer laborious work.
Along with his mop of black hair, his boyish demeanor and his seemingly boundless power, he captured the favored creativeness early on.
He discovered himself close to the highest of the American orchestral world in 1973, when he was named music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He scored many successes over time, proving particularly adept at huge, complicated works that many others discovered unwieldy.
He toured broadly and recorded extensively with the orchestra. However his 29-year tenure, ending in 2002, was, many thought, too lengthy for anybody’s good: his personal, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’.
“As a younger man, Ozawa displayed the best bodily reward for conducting of anybody in his era, and a variety and accuracy of musical reminiscence that struck awe and envy into the hearts of most musicians who encountered it,” Richard Dyer, the music critic of the Boston Globe, wrote upon Mr. Ozawa’s departure from the orchestra. Mr. Ozawa, he added, was “leaving the orchestra and the establishment higher off than he discovered them.”
Regardless of being a job mannequin for Asian musicians, Mr. Ozawa didn’t usually communicate concerning the challenges he confronted. However he as soon as recalled feeling some bias after he was booed throughout performances of Puccini’s “Tosca” at La Scala in Milan in 1980.
“The sound I gave to ‘Tosca’ was not the ‘Tosca’ that they have been used to,” he mentioned in “Completely on Music,” a 2016 e book of conversations between Mr. Ozawa and the novelist Haruki Murakami. “I feel that’s what it was. And likewise, in fact, to some extent, as Italians, they’d a tough time accepting the truth that an Asian conductor may come and conduct ‘Tosca.’”
Although comparatively inexperienced in opera, he left Boston to turn into music director of the august Vienna State Opera, the place he stayed till 2010. The remainder of his life was primarily consumed with well being points and with desires of a significant comeback on the live performance stage, which he was by no means capable of obtain.
Seiji Ozawa was born to Japanese dad and mom, Kaisaku and Sakura Ozawa, in Japanese-occupied Shenyang, China, on Sept. 1, 1935. (The household returned to Japan in 1944.) He studied piano as a baby however gave up ideas of a pianistic profession when he broke two fingers taking part in rugby. He studied conducting below Hideo Saito, the pre-eminent trainer of Western music in Japan, on the Toho College of Music in Tokyo.
In 1959, Mr. Ozawa traveled to Europe on a cargo ship, bringing a motor scooter and a guitar. He gained a contest for orchestral conductors that yr in Besançon, France, and was invited by one of many judges, Charles Munch, then the music director of the Boston Symphony, to review on the Berkshire Music Heart at Tanglewood, the orchestra’s summer time dwelling in western Massachusetts.
After profitable the Koussevitzky Prize for excellent pupil conductors there, he returned to Europe. He studied with Herbert von Karajan in Berlin and drew the curiosity of Leonard Bernstein, who appointed him an assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1961. He held that place till 1964.
Two years later, not but well-known, Mr. Ozawa appeared on the tv present “What’s My Line?,” on which celeb panelists needed to guess his occupation on the idea of yes-or-no solutions. It took them some time. However his ascent had already begun.
In 1964, he turned creative director of the Ravinia Pageant in Illinois, the summer time dwelling of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1965, Bernstein advisable him to Walter Homburger, the managing director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, who was searching for a music director to exchange Walter Susskind. Mr. Ozawa took the job, and his profession took off.
He left each these positions in 1969 and was named music director of the San Francisco Symphony the following yr, a publish he held till 1976. He was additionally creative director of the Berkshire Music Heart at Tanglewood from 1970 to 1973, sharing the place with the composer Gunther Schuller and solidifying his standing with the Boston Symphony.
Mr. Ozawa performed a job in easing tensions between China and the US in 1979, when the Boston Symphony led a tour in China, which was nonetheless rising from the Cultural Revolution.
Peter Gelb, the overall supervisor of the Metropolitan Opera, who then labored because the Boston Symphony’s director of publicity, mentioned that Mr. Ozawa had been important in making the tour occur; Chinese language officers, he mentioned, felt related to Mr. Ozawa as a result of he had spent a part of his childhood in China.
Mr. Gelb referred to as him one of the vital influential conductors of the twentieth century, one who had introduced new audiences to classical music.
“He had the best method,” he added, “and along with his lengthy hair and beads, he was a logo of male magnificence on the rostrum that I don’t assume the world had seen earlier than.”
Aside from conducting Boston Symphony live shows, Mr. Ozawa’s relationship with Tanglewood over time was considerably halting however sometimes eventful. In 1994, the orchestra constructed an impressive 1,180-seat auditorium on the campus, in Lenox, Mass. Norio Ohga, the president of the Sony Company, donated $2 million of the almost $10 million it price on the situation that the construction be named Seiji Ozawa Corridor.
Storm clouds gathered just a few years later when Mr. Ozawa, after years of relative inactivity on the Tanglewood Music Heart, as the varsity was now referred to as, asserted his prerogatives because the orchestra’s music director.
Complaining of a decline within the high quality of the conducting program and inadequate illustration of orchestra members on the college, he fired a key administrator in 1996. The following yr, outstanding school members — together with the pianists Leon Fleisher, the middle’s creative director; and Gilbert Kalish, its school chairman — left in protest, citing a scarcity of any clear imaginative and prescient from Mr. Ozawa.
Mr. Ozawa remained energetic in Japan throughout his Boston tenure. He turned honorary creative director of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra (now the New Japan Philharmonic) in 1980. 4 years later, he helped discovered the Saito Kinen Orchestra, a memorial to the beloved mentor of his youth. This spawned the Saito Kinen Pageant in Matsumoto in 1992; the occasion was renamed the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Pageant in 2015.
After leaving the Boston Symphony in 2002, he returned to Boston as its music director laureate in 2008 for 2 live shows at Symphony Corridor, his ultimate appearances with the orchestra.
He final carried out at Tanglewood in 2006. Mr. Ozawa canceled a scheduled return in 2010 for well being causes and needed to cancel once more in 2016, saying he lacked the mandatory bodily power after returning to Japan from a quick interval conducting in Europe.
Mr. Ozawa’s shift to opera got here as a shock, given his restricted expertise within the style. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1992, conducting Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” and returned solely as soon as, in 2008, to conduct Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.”
On the Vienna State Opera, he was capable of fill in lots of gaps left by a profession spent nearly fully in live performance halls. However he tended to keep away from the usual repertory in favor of the fringes, as in his first huge splash: a brand new manufacturing of Ernst Krenek’s jazz-tinged, Weimar-era “Jonny spielt auf” in 2003.
He was additionally capable of conduct and tour with the Vienna Philharmonic, an elite, self-governed contingent of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. He led the orchestra in three live shows at Carnegie Corridor in 2004.
Mr. Ozawa was to make a triumphal return to Carnegie within the 2010-11 season, however the occasion, although in some methods the fruits of his profession, needed to be severely curtailed. He had traveled to New York in December 2010 hoping to conduct the Saito Kinen Orchestra in three applications at Carnegie as a part of its citywide pageant JapanNYC. However, having suffered by the yr with bouts of sciatica, he needed to cut back his efforts in every of the primary two live shows to a lone main work.
He retained simply sufficient of his youthful vigor to complete with an enormous effort, conducting Britten’s sprawling, deeply emotional “Battle Requiem.” It turned out to be Mr. Ozawa’s final efficiency in New York.
As creative director of JapanNYC, he was scheduled to return to Carnegie in April 2011 to conduct live shows by the Seiji Ozawa Ongaku-juku, a Japanese youth orchestra. However he needed to cancel that and most subsequent engagements.
Mr. Ozawa made a modest worldwide comeback in April 2016, main the Berlin Philharmonic on the Berliner Philharmonie and the orchestra of the Seiji Ozawa Worldwide Academy Switzerland in Paris.
He final traveled to the US in December 2015 to just accept a Kennedy Heart Honor, bestowed by President Barack Obama.
He’s survived by two brothers, Mikio and Toshio Ozawa; his spouse, Vera; their son, Yukiyoshi, an actor; their daughter, Seira, a author; and a grandson.
Within the waning years of his life, Mr. Ozawa got here to acknowledge the knowledge that comes from years of music making.
“A musician’s particular taste comes out with age,” he instructed Mr. Murakami within the 2016 e book of conversations. “His taking part in at that stage could have extra fascinating qualities than on the peak of his profession.”
Alex Marshall and Javier C. Hernández contributed reporting.
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