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Seiji Ozawa, the high-spirited Japanese conductor who took the Western classical music world by storm within the Sixties and ’70s after which led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for nearly 30 years, died on Tuesday at his residence in Tokyo. He was 88.
The trigger was coronary heart failure, in response to 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 identified with esophageal most cancers. He by no means absolutely rebounded from most cancers surgical procedure or from again issues that had been made worse throughout his restoration, and he was hospitalized with coronary heart valve illness later in life.
Mr. Ozawa was essentially the most outstanding harbinger of a motion that has reworked the classical music world during the last half-century: an amazing 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 might 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 character, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer arduous work.
With his mop of black hair, his boyish demeanor and his seemingly boundless vitality, 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 large, complicated works that many others discovered unwieldy.
He toured extensively and recorded extensively with the orchestra. But 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 technology, 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.”
Despite being a task mannequin for Asian musicians, Mr. Ozawa didn’t typically converse in regards to the challenges he confronted. But 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 had been used to,” he mentioned in “Absolutely on Music,” a 2016 guide of conversations between Mr. Ozawa and the novelist Haruki Murakami. “I believe that’s what it was. And additionally, after all, to some extent, as Italians, that they had a tough time accepting the truth that an Asian conductor may come and conduct ‘Tosca.’”
Though comparatively inexperienced in opera, he left Boston to change 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 goals of a significant comeback on the live performance stage, which he was by no means capable of obtain.
Seiji Ozawa was born to Japanese mother and father, 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 enjoying rugby. He studied conducting below Hideo Saito, the pre-eminent teacher of Western music in Japan, on the Toho School 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 12 months 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 Center at Tanglewood, the orchestra’s summer time residence in western Massachusetts.
After profitable the Koussevitzky Prize for excellent scholar 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 superstar panelists needed to guess his occupation on the idea of yes-or-no solutions. It took them some time. But his ascent had already begun.
In 1964, he turned inventive director of the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, the summer time residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1965, Bernstein beneficial him to Walter Homburger, the managing director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, who was searching for a music director to interchange 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 12 months, a put up he held till 1976. He was additionally inventive director of the Berkshire Music Center 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 task in easing tensions between China and the United States in 1979, when the Boston Symphony led a tour in China, which was nonetheless rising from the Cultural Revolution.
Peter Gelb, the overall manager 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 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 crucial 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.”
Apart from conducting Boston Symphony concert events, 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 Corporation, donated $2 million of the almost $10 million it value on the situation that the construction be named Seiji Ozawa Hall.
Storm clouds gathered just a few years later when Mr. Ozawa, after years of relative inactivity on the Tanglewood Music Center, 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 subsequent 12 months, outstanding school members — together with the pianists Leon Fleisher, the middle’s inventive 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 lively in Japan throughout his Boston tenure. He turned honorary inventive director of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra (now the New Japan Philharmonic) in 1980. Four years later, he helped discovered the Saito Kinen Orchestra, a memorial to the beloved mentor of his youth. This spawned the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto in 1992; the occasion was renamed the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival in 2015.
After leaving the Boston Symphony in 2002, he returned to Boston as its music director laureate in 2008 for 2 concert events at Symphony Hall, his closing 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 energy after returning to Japan from a short 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.”
At the Vienna State Opera, he was capable of fill in lots of gaps left by a profession spent virtually solely in live performance halls. But he tended to keep away from the usual repertory in favor of the fringes, as in his first large 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 concert events at Carnegie Hall 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 end result 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. But, having suffered by means of the 12 months with bouts of sciatica, he needed to reduce his efforts in every of the primary two concert events 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 “War Requiem.” It turned out to be Mr. Ozawa’s final efficiency in New York.
As inventive director of JapanNYC, he was scheduled to return to Carnegie in April 2011 to conduct concert events by the Seiji Ozawa Ongaku-juku, a Japanese youth orchestra. But 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 International Academy Switzerland in Paris.
He final traveled to the United States in December 2015 to just accept a Kennedy Center Honor, bestowed by President Barack Obama.
He is survived by two brothers, Mikio and Toshio Ozawa; his spouse, Vera; their son, Yukiyoshi, an actor; their daughter, Seira, a author; and a grandson.
In 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 advised Mr. Murakami within the 2016 guide of conversations. “His enjoying at that stage might have extra fascinating qualities than on the top of his profession.”
Alex Marshall and Javier C. Hernández contributed reporting.
