Renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa is remembered as ‘graceful,’ ‘supernaturally’ gifted

Brian McCreath: It really kind of started in Europe. He won a competition in France which caught the notice of another legendary Boston Symphony music director. That’s Charles Munch, who invited Seiji to come to Boston, really to study at Tanglewood at what was known as the Berkshire Music Center at the time, now called the Tanglewood Music Center in western Massachusetts, where the Boston Symphony spends the summers along with its academy there. Seiji was one of the conductors there who studied with Munch and with others and won the Koussevitzky Prize, which is kind of a big deal, given to the best conducting student of the summer every year. And so, that brought him to the attention of a ton of people. And then, his career really took off through the 1960s.

It was, maybe not unprecedented, but extremely unconventional. So, Seiji was coming in at a time when the orchestra had gone through a few years of music directorship of William Steinberg, a German conductor, and previous to that, several years had been spent with Erich Leinsdorf, an Austrian conductor. So, there’s this very heavy Central European focus that the BSO had, both in its sound approach and in its, sort of, profile internationally. So, you bring in Seiji, who is extremely gifted, sort of supernaturally gifted almost, as a conductor. And he brought with him an audience in Japan and throughout Asia. And all of a sudden, there was a new group of people paying attention to the Boston Symphony. It launched the Boston Symphony, already an international orchestra, to a new level of renown around the world. And frankly, the audience connection to the Boston Symphony in Asia remains to this day.

Well, there is a bias, especially back in the 1960s and early ’70s, such a prevalent bias of, sort of, tradition and heritage being part of classical music, that you must come from a certain part of the world to understand the soul of classical music. And frankly, a lot of Europeans felt that way about the United States, too. So, when Seiji comes along, not only does he disprove this comprehensively, what he brings as well is a brilliance of conducting that very few conductors have ever matched. He brought a physicality to his art that was almost, as I’ve heard it described, like a ballet dancer. Everything he did physically communicated what he wanted from the musicians in the nuance and the interpretation of the music they were playing.

Yeah, I mean, he wasn’t a large man physically. He was a little bit on the diminutive side, but he had this, for most of his career, he had this big hair, kind of a mop-top hair, right? And so, when you watched him, he was graceful. His body would bend in certain ways and move in certain ways in time with the music. Now, sometimes we in the audience watch conductors, and it’s almost as though they’re performing the music physically. That wasn’t the case so much with Seiji. It all had a meaning. In fact, one BSO executive at one point told me that he watched in a masterclass Seiji teach students to begin pieces of music like, say, Beethoven’s “5th Symphony,” actually one of the hardest pieces of music to conduct at the very beginning. He would teach his students to do that with no hands, no arms. They would have to do it basically with their eyes and facial expression. That’s the kind of thing that he could pull off. Now, of course, he did use his hands and arms when he conducted that music in a concert, but that was the the extent to which the physicality of the music moved through his body and communicated to the musicians in the orchestra.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Seiji, again, he had a huge following in Europe. The orchestras there, by and large, loved to have him come in and be a guest conductor. But along with the fan base or the audience that you might find in Japan and throughout Asia, he also had the backing of major corporations in Japan, which had its own benefits for the Boston Symphony, which wasn’t in terrible shape in 1973, but like a lot of the economy at that particular time, it was a bit rough. Seiji opened the door to corporations like Sony and TDK and Nippon Electric supporting the orchestra with their sponsorship. So again, the affection for Seiji in Japan and throughout Asia spread to the rest of the world everywhere classical music was heard.

He became very well-known around Boston for his enthusiasm for our sports teams. And you can find dozens of pictures of Seiji wearing a Red Sox hat or Red Sox jersey or coat. And he was constantly showing up at Fenway Park. Also a big fan of the Celtics and every other sport that was in Boston; the orchestra would make sure that he had access to the latest scores wherever he was. You know, how the Red Sox were doing in the standings, all of these.

Yeah, of course, they supplied him with the scores he needed for his job, too. But yes, he was full of life. When you hear people talk about him, they speak of someone who was warm and generous. He was not uncontroversial, though. I mean, he made some moves during his time with the Boston Symphony that were hard-edged and almost ruthless. And so, there is that side of him as an organizational leader where he took difficult decisions, was not well-received at times, but that’s part of the game of being a major league music director of a major orchestra.