Seiji Ozawa, the unconventional maestro who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra longer than any other music director, has died of heart failure at the age of 88. The Japanese conductor will be remembered for breaking barriers, courting controversy and loving a certain Boston baseball team throughout his career.
Ozawa’s hire would pave the way for other Asian musicians to cross into a genre dominated for centuries by white men. This cultural sea change wasn’t lost on the maestro either, as he told. “Since I’m kind of pioneer,” he said, “I must do my best before I die so people younger than me think: 'oh, that is possible.'”
That first concert blew Ozawa’s mind. When the Symphony of the Air performed in Japan, Ozawa said his eyes and ears opened even more."It was a completely different sound," he remembered."So I told myself I must go out of this country, Japan, to be with this kind of sound." “What a dancer he was,” retired BSO trombonist Norman Bolter recalled. “But not only just as a dancer getting up there and doing his own jig.”
For the trombonist, Ozawa’s grasp of certain composers was profound. “Seiji did Bartók — in my mind — like nobody did,” he said, adding, “the maestro let the orchestra play, he wasn’t a control freak in that way.”. During our interview for a story about Ozawa's award, Hollywood film composer John Williams called his fellow BSO alum “a beacon” lighting the way for Eastern musicians to head west. “We have a lot of younger virtuosi coming now, especially from China,” Williams said.
“His legacy of handling personnel issues I don’t think was always, um, ideal,” Pfiefer recalled. Even so, she said Ozawa changed the face of the orchestra. She also called him a musical ambassador for taking the BSO to China in 1979. It became the first U.S. cultural organization to do so after diplomatic relations with the country were normalized.
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