Learning with Seiji -- He has grown from young star into Old Master, making mistakes and improving and teaching us all the way
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 4/14/2002
The relationship of a music director to an orchestra is like a marriage, Seiji Ozawa has often said. The comparison holds: the partnership of Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra has weathered honeymoon, quarrels and reconciliations, uncertainties and storms, calls for divorce, moments of harsh discord, and triumphs of togetherness. As the relationship moves into a new key after 29 seasons, Ozawa is a different man and musician because of his association with the BSO, and the BSO is different because of him. Both have taken risks, made mistakes, and learned from them. Both have widened their range and relevance; both can do things they couldn't have done before.
The marriage of Ozawa and the BSO has been controversial from the beginning, and you don't have to go far to hear the old criticism that Ozawa lacks depth of musical insight, and you can even sense the old subtext, no longer openly spoken, that as an Asian musician, he can never really live inside Western music. The fact is that Ozawa has proved himself more capable of flexibility, change, growth, and development than some of his critics.
As a young man, Ozawa displayed the greatest physical gift for conducting of anyone in his generation, and a range and accuracy of musical memory that struck awe and envy into the hearts of most musicians who encountered it. Those who crowd into Symphony Hall next weekend to see and hear Ozawa conduct the free performance of Berlioz's ''Symphonie fantastique'' and the farewell performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony will experience what audiences around the world have applauded for 40 years. His conducting, in recent years without a baton, remains beautiful to watch, and unique in the amount of focused information and emotion that he can communicate through glance, attitude, and gesture. Ozawa is calligraphy in motion, precise and evocative.
As a young man - and Ozawa was only 37 when he was named music director - Ozawa had a swinging image. He did wear his hair long and wrap love beads around his neck, but he did little else to cultivate a contemporary persona, although the BSO capitalized on his appearance in a successful effort to reach younger audiences - those love beads were in every photograph in every subway car in the city.
The facts were not always in harmony with the image. Ozawa was no counterculture hero. Instead he had a tremendous respect for history and authority. Like all smart young conductors, he purposefully engaged Old Master soloists from whom he learned style and tradition - just as he was willing and eager to learn these qualities from the orchestras he conducted, including the BSO. And his tastes in repertory were conservative.
Paradoxically, now that Ozawa is 66 and beginning to be acclaimed in Vienna and elsewhere as an Old Master himself, he is far more radical, eclectic, and exploratory than he was as a young man. He is still eager to ''taste'' all that music, particularly opera, that he hasn't had the opportunity to conduct before, still adding nearly as much to his repertory as he repeats. In Vienna he has been conducting Janacek's ''Jenufa,'' and his official debut as music director will be in Krenek's jazz opera ''Jonny spielt auf.'' In his farewell Boston season he returned to works by Henri Dutilleux and Toro Takemitsu that he had premiered, and introduced a new concerto by Eric Tanguy. He is still springing surprises, like his unexpectedly nimble-footed way with the light Viennese repertory this year at the traditional New Year's Day concert by the Vienna Philharmonic. Humor is not a quality anyone had associated with his music making.
--Strong suits, anomalies--
He is still good at the things he was always good at - dramatic storytelling music; gestural music, like ballet scores (his blazing performance of Bartok's ''Miraculous Mandarin'' suite won him his BSO job); large-scale music with choruses and soloists requiring organizational skills and mastery of the rehearsal process; the important masterpieces of the first half of the 20th century; anything in which color is an important element of structure. He is, along with his successor James Levine, probably the best accompanist in the business, and a favorite of nearly all the soloists who work with him.
And one of the most remarkable aspects of Ozawa's BSO tenure is the extraordinarily large and loyal family of international soloists he has built over several generations of performers. One doesn't have to share all of Ozawa's enthusiasms to feel he couldn't have done a lot better in this respect. He has also been generous in bringing forward local artists; it was he who gave Lorraine Hunt Lieberson her first recording, long before she became famous.
Ozawa's footing has always been less sure in music of the baroque and classical periods, a failing he shared with most of his contemporaries, including the specialists from the historically informed performance movement. Today it is easier, by far, to win applause for Mahler, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich than it is to conduct Mozart and Beethoven convincingly, yet Mozart and Beethoven remain at the core of the repertory.
Anomalies abound. Ozawa's early Bach perfomances were in the old German romantic manner that he grew up with; they felt and sounded more authentic than his more recent Bach performances, prepared after consultation with early-music gurus. Ozawa claims Mozart as his favorite composer nowadays, but you wouldn't know it from his Mozart symphony performances. Still, his collaborations on Mozart piano concertos with Peter Serkin and Maria Tipo were sublime. Recently, he's been conducting all the major Mozart operas in Japan, some of them for the first time. Ozawa does put himself through rigorous disciplines of self-improvement, and this operatic experience is bound to show when he returns to the Mozart symphonies.
--A long learning curve--
In some music, he has changed beyond all recognition; his Mahler was embarrassing 25 years ago, and now three or four of the symphonies are cornerstones of his repertory, acclaimed in Berlin and Vienna as well as in Boston and Tokyo. Ozawa's operatic work was problematic before he became multilingual; now he's become an exceptional opera conductor, and the experience of playing opera has been very good for the BSO.
Some things he may never be good at. No conductor has ever been equally excellent at everything, and it's a lot harder now that there is so much more of musical history that a conductor is expected to deal with. But Ozawa is a generous man, aware that it is important to have others do things he doesn't choose to, or excel at - and to do them at the highest level. During his tenure, the BSO's roster of guest conductors has consistently been strong, and Ozawa's most important protege, Robert Spano, has emerged as the most gifted American conductor of his generation.
Ozawa did become a notable interpreter of contemporary music. His close personal friendships with Olivier Messiaen, Dutilleux, and Takemitsu led to many notable events here and abroad, and although he was often chided for neglecting local composers, he did lead works by a dozen of them, three of whom have developed significant long-term relationships with the orchestra: John Harbison, Peter Lieberson, and Osvaldo Golijov.
Of course progress hasn't been sure and steady. There were bumps and slumps along the road, and some long plateaus that were not as high as one wanted them to be. Nor was every controversy fruitful - the BSO did not occupy the high ground in 1982 when it called off performances of Stravinsky's ''Oedipus rex'' because of protests against the presence of the pro-Palestinian actress Vanessa Redgrave as narrator.
Ozawa belonged to the first generation in which it was physically possible to develop a major career on three continents; he took advantage of the opportunity. A devoted father, he was never happy when he was away from his family, which remained based in Japan. All that stress and strain, all that jet travel, all those separations from his children, particularly when they were young, may not have been good for him personally, physically, or artistically. There were periods when he was being pulled in too many directions, and the conflicts affected his health and sometimes his concentration, and performances suffered. On the other hand, Ozawa's whirlwind life did keep the BSO in the international loop, bringing important international artists such as Thomas Quasthoff to Symphony Hall before most American music lovers had ever heard of them.
--Orchestral maneuvers--
A few years ago there was a lot of publicity about how Ozawa had ''wrecked'' the BSO, that the orchestra was in an artistic downslide and even no longer capable playing with basic technical discipline. Most of this came from people who were not in a position to hear the orchestra regularly. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. Ozawa has appointed more than 75 players out of the BSO's 101 members, finding worthy successors to the fabled principal players he inherited from previous music directors, and building strength in entire sections. Some current principals are building legends as potent as those of their predecessors.
Inevitably Ozawa has made a few costly personnel mistakes, and not every player ages well. When a conductor is routine and uninspired, the orchestra can sound that way too. But today's BSO can deliver anything any conductor wants from it, and probably more than many of them do ask for. James Levine systematically checked out the orchestra before committing himself to the music directorship, and found a situation he could work with.
An orchestra is an old-fashioned and unwieldy organism that cannot change as fast as the surrounding society. Ozawa's BSO was not ahead of the curve in social development and awareness - but in many respects it was significantly ahead of the progress of other orchestras. Ozawa's early career was shadowed by prejudice, but he has kept himself remarkably free of it, and he saw before many other music directors that a major orchestra could no longer function in ivory-tower isolation from social change.
He has always been totally colorblind in his choice of soloists. His orchestra commissioned two African-American composers, and one of them, George Walker, won the Pulitzer Prize for his effort. The work of woman composers became a more important part of the repertory. There were 9 women playing in the BSO Ozawa inherited; there are 27 today, including the orchestra's first female bassoonist. There was one African-American when Ozawa started; that there are only two today says more about sociology and music education than it says about Ozawa, and it was during his tenure that the BSO and other institutions collaborated to create Project STEP to address musical training for minorities.
In his time the complexion of the board and staff has changed, and so have the demographics of the audience. In Dr. Nicholas Zervas, the BSO had its first non-Yankee board chairman. Myran Parker-Brass, the orchestra's director of education and community programs, has successfully appeared as a gospel soloist with the Boston Pops.
--A work in progress--
Ozawa is a man of strong emotions, stubborn convictions, fierce loyalties, and personal generosity. And he inspires those qualities in others. The devotion Ozawa has generated among board and staff has led to the most spectacular period of institutional development since the orchestra's early history - the acquisition and development of real estate in Boston and at Tanglewood, which has doubled in size and now houses an important new hall named after Ozawa, and the exponential growth and consolidation of fund-raising and endowment. Ozawa's electric connection with the public has never faltered, and at every concert since he announced his resignation three years ago, he has been greeted by tumultuous ovations that are also heartfelt; the public loves him.
His 60th birthday, the deaths of his mentors Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan, the death of a beloved brother, and a career-threatening skiing accident led to significant changes in Ozawa's life, his priorities, his music making; to his credit, Ozawa remained a work in progress. The surface invariably remained brilliant, leading, inevitably, to repeated charges of superficiality, but attentive listeners heard new refinements, new depths in his work. Subtlety had become at least as strong a characteristic as flash, and the 1996 performances of Ravel's ''L'enfant et les sortileges'' were even more enchanting than the ones from 1974.
It is time for a change both for Ozawa and the orchestra, but one has to view the change with mixed emotions. We looped up and down the learning curve with Ozawa, educating ourselves in the process. Vienna is getting the payoff period of the Old Master, although surely Ozawa's connection to the BSO, which began when he first heard it in 1958, will continue for the rest of his life.
At the moment of change, it's important to remember that Ozawa inherited a proud institution that had known better days. He's been around so long that many have forgotten how demoralized the orchestra was after the tenures of Erich Leinsdorf and William Steinberg as music director, and how erratic it could sound.
Ozawa may not have lifted the BSO into a period of consistent historic greatness, may not have forged one of those partnerships of orchestra and conductor that become permanent points of reference. But he has left indelible, interactive memories of great performances now stretching across three decades. Hearing Mstislav Rostropovich play the Dvorak Concerto with Ozawa just last week, some of us simultaneously heard his whole glorious history with Ozawa and the BSO.
Every outstanding performance in these last Ozawa seasons, and there have been many of them, has brought with it a nimbus of similar associations. Ozawa is leaving the orchestra and the institution better off than he found them - he has been a faithful steward, and to his successor, he's turning over a great and responsive instrument, supported by a strong, secure superstructure. That's plenty to be proud of, and grateful for.