He was only 27 and all but unknown in America in 1963 when Seiji Ozawa, the mop-haired Japanese conducting student of Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan, was named music director of the Ravinia Festival.
Exuberant, eager to learn, obviously on the brink of an important career, he won over the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the audience and the press with his charm and his dedication to music. His six summers at the CSO’s summer home, beginning in 1964, would prove critical for his artistic growth and that of the festival as well. It was here that the musical world first took notice of the extraordinary talent, and even more extraordinary promise, of Ozawa.
Thirty-eight years later, Ozawa is among a handful of senior conductors of international stature. Just about the only things about him that haven’t changed are his shaggy hair and enthusiastic, if somewhat broken, English.
It seems odd to use the word “senior” in conjunction with the still-youthful maestro Chicago musicians once called “Seiji-san.” The 65-year-old Ozawa, speaking by phone from Japan, laughs when I remind him of his old nickname. He has served almost 28 years as music director of the Boston Symphony, making him the longest-tenured music director in the orchestra’s history and, indeed, of any major orchestra in the world.
Now that he has announced he is leaving the BSO after the 2002 Tanglewood season, Ozawa is focusing his energies further afield. In fall 2002 he assumes the post of music director of the Vienna State Opera once held by Claudio Abbado. He also is planning to devote more podium time to the Saito Kinen Orchestra, the Tokyo-based ensemble he co-founded in 1984. He will lead the Saito Kinen in its Chicago debut at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Symphony Center. The concert program holds a single work, Mahler’s Symphony No. 9.
Although the Saito Kinen Orchestra has toured Europe five times and played a single concert in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1991 at the invitation of Isaac Stern, this marks its first American tour; other stops are San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.
The orchestra’s name means “friends of Saito” — a reference to Hideo Saito, the young Ozawa’s teacher at Tokyo’s Toho School of Music, revered throughout Japan for cultivating Western music and musical technique. Saito had absorbed the German playing style and repertory, and French musical pedagogy, in Europe between the world wars and had brought this knowledge to Japan.
For a concert series commemorating the 10th anniversary of Saito’s death, in 1984, Ozawa formed an orchestra consisting of more than 100 of Saito’s former students. The personnel were drawn mainly from players in Japanese orchestras (Tokyo itself has nine professional symphony orchestras), augmented by a handful of musicians from Europe and the U.S. such as Karl Leister, the distinguished German principal clarinetist, and Everett (Vic) Firth, the Boston Symphony’s longtime principal timpanist.
Such was the success of those concerts, Ozawa explains, that the Saito Kinen became a permanent ensemble. In 1992 the orchestra became the resident ensemble of Japan’s first international festival, the Saito Kinen Festival, located in Matsumoto, in the Japanese Alps.
Out of gratitude to his own mentors, Ozawa says he intends to focus his efforts in the years ahead to developing classical music training through the Saito Kinen Orchestra and teaching at his alma mater, the Toho music school.
“It would be a big mistake if I didn’t teach, because Mr. Saito was so important to me,” Ozawa says. “I can’t be like him, but we should do something, leave something after we die. … These days there is not much chance, anywhere in the world, for a young conductor to have the kind of training I did. To be fair to the next generation, I want to create this kind of chance for young people.”
Of course, to call the Saito Kinen a permanent orchestra, in the Western sense of that word, is misleading. The ensemble gathers to perform concerts and opera, also to tour and make recordings (their latest release, and it’s a fine one, is Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, on Sony), only twice a year — at the end of August and late in December. This is purely a matter of scheduling and logistics, since those are holiday weeks for the musicians and the only times most of them are free from commitments to their regular orchestras.
But for participating players — about half of whom are old enough to have known Saito and to have profited directly from his teaching — playing under Saito’s foremost conducting student clearly is a special privilege. Says Ikuko Mizuno, a violinist who has performed with both the Saito Kinen and the BSO: “Everybody thinks I’m crazy to use my vacation to work with the same conductor. But here [Ozawa] is testing us to see what we want. He’s experimenting. That’s why this is heaven for him — he can work to perfection.”
Such is the adulation Ozawa enjoys in Japan — some have likened his popularity to Michael Jordan’s — that he has encountered no problems securing both public and private funding for the Saito Kinen. “Although Matsumoto is a rather small town, they give us this money and welcome us very much. We have a wonderful audience here,” says the conductor.
Japan did not always accord him superstar status. This is a country whose top orchestra, the NHK Symphony, sent a young Ozawa packing back in the ’60s, rejecting him as brash, immature and nonconformist. Critics wrote that he was too green for the job. He was accused of not knowing the music. Player resentment simmered until the musicians boycotted a performance, leaving the 27-year-old conductor standing alone onstage, angry and humiliated.
“Maybe I was too young. They thought I was too American, but I didn’t even speak English then,” Ozawa recalls, with a laugh.
He is enjoying something of a last laugh in Boston as well, a city where he has come in for a great deal of critical heat and controversy during his long tenure with the BSO. While no one can fault his highly developed work ethic or his abiding commitment to music or to the orchestra as an institution, many fault the depth and quality of his leadership. Critics have found a number of recent BSO performances lackluster and pinned the problem squarely on Ozawa’s allegedly erratic command. Greg Sandow, writing two years ago in the Wall Street Journal, wrote, “As an ensemble, the Boston Symphony under Mr. Ozawa is like a painting that badly needs to be restored.”
But Ozawa has survived every well-aimed brickbat and, according to orchestra sources, continues to sell tickets. Being very secure in himself, he can brush aside the bad press. He insists his orchestra remains in “wonderful” shape, thanks in large measure to the “many young, strong players” who have joined the ranks during his directorship. He insists today’s BSO compares favorably with the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, which he also conducts regularly.
Asked to cite his greatest accomplishments in Boston, he gives himself credit for developing a “deeper, darker, more German sound” in an orchestra that under Serge Koussevitzky and Charles Munch was famous for its French timbre and transparency. “Boston has its own color and it never pushes. The musicians never become rough; they hear well and blend well. Of course, like every orchestra we are sometimes up, sometimes down. But [the playing] never comes down below Boston Symphony standard. If people do not agree, that’s OK. But I don’t understand what they are talking about.”
However controversial the BSO’s chief conductor remains in some quarters, his achievements with the Saito Kinen Orchestra signal to some listeners — although perhaps not his harshest detractors — the advent of a new emotional depth and concentration in his conducting. His Mahler Ninth with that ensemble here should go a long way toward telling us who is right, and whether the star so auspiciously launched at Ravinia nearly four decades ago shines as brightly as it once appeared.