Remembering Conductor Seiji Ozawa (1935-2024)
Longtime Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Seiji Ozawa has passed away. He was 88.
Conductor Seiji-Ozawa in 1983. Photo by Akira-Kinoshita, courtesy Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Born in Japanese-occupied China in 1935, Ozawa graduated from Tokyo's Toho School of Music, having switched to conducting after a rugby injury threatened his studies in piano. He later studied under Herbert von Karajan, and Leonard Bernstein appointed him assistant conductor the New York Philharmonic in 1961.
Ozawa became the music director for Ravinia Festival, near Chicago, in 1964, followed by appointments with Toronto Symphony Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony. But he was perhaps best known for his long tenure as the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Appointed in 1973 and serving 29 years, Osawa captured national attention in large part due to the PBS series "Evening at Symphony," produced by Boston's WGBH.
As one of the first widely-known classical musicians of Asian descent in the United States, Ozawa broke barriers in the U.S. and abroad. In 1979, he conducted the Beijing Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - the first live performance of the work in China in nearly 20 years. In 1988, he conducted a worldwide performance of that symphony's Ode to Joy for the opening ceremony of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan - bringing together choruses in Nagano and cities around the world for the live international broadcast.
In 1994, Boston's Tanglewood opened the Seiji Ozawa Hall in his honor. In 2002, he stepped down from the BSO to become principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera, a position he held until 2010. That year, he announced that he had esophageal cancer and would be cancelling all engagements. He last visited the United States to accept a Kennedy Center Honor in 2015.
"The sad news of Seiji Ozawa’s passing brings to a close the life of one of the 20th Century’s most luminous musical performers. The world has lost a great artist, and I have lost a treasured friend," former Boston Pops conductor and five-time Oscar winner John Williams said in a statement released by the BSO.
"Seiji was our musical director of the Boston Symphony for twenty-nine wonderful years... years in which he brought to our brilliant orchestra a broadened expanse of repertoire and a heightened degree of technical luster. All of our condolences to go his beautiful family, and we will always relish the memory of this extraordinary man who brought so much beauty and light into our world."
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I don't think he made many visits to the UK but in about 1985 I remember wandering round the gallery of the Royal Albert Hall during a BBC Proms concert of Mahler 2, splendidly performed of course. The music and the venue were perfectly complementary.
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February 10, 2024 at 02:01 AM · Maestro Ozawa was the orchestra conductor of my childhood, because he was on TV all the time. I would have been 8 years old when he started conducting the Boston Symphony.