The New York Times           June 23, 1999

   ANOTHER KEY PODIUM TO BE VACATED AS BOSTON'S OZAWA HEADS FOR VIENNA
   By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

   In an unexpected turn that opens another prime podium in the world
   of classical music, the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced yesterday
   that its long-reigning music director and leading conductor, Seiji
   Ozawa, would leave after the 2002 season to take over the baton at
   the Vienna State Opera.

   Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

   The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced that its music director and
   leading conductor, Seiji Ozawa, would join the Vienna State Opera.

   The decision, the orchestra said, was set to be formalized this
   morning in Vienna, where Ozawa, 63, was to meet with government
   officials and the opera's manager, Ioan Holender.  Ozawa, who has
   led the Boston Symphony since 1973, and is the longest-tenured music
   director of any of the world's major orchestras, notified the Boston
   Symphony's management on Monday.

   The shift adds Boston to a list of venerable orchestras that will
   have podiums to fill over the coming years - Berlin, Philadelphia,
   New York, Atlanta, Houston, Indianapolis and Cincinnati, among others.
   Berlin, where Claudio Abbado has announced his retirement in 2002,
   is said to be close to a choice between two likely candidates, Daniel
   Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Sir
   Simon Rattle, who recently left Britain's City of Birmingham Symphony.

   This month, another vacancy was filled with the appointment of the
   Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Moest, by the Cleveland Orchestra.
   The New York Philharmonic has said it is beginning to look for a
   replacement for Kurt Masur, whose contract expires in 2002 but who
   may want to stay on.

   The Ozawa move comes at a time when an unusually high number of
   conductorships are up for grabs.  Although it has become common for
   music directors to divide their time between ensembles on both sides
   of the Atlantic, word that Ozawa's career was to take this turn caught
   many in the music world by surprise.  He will be setting down in a
   music capital famous for being hard on its musical icons from Gustav
   Mahler to Herbert von Karajan.

   Ronald A.  Wilford, Ozawa's representative at Columbia Artists
   Management in Manhattan, called the symphony's announcement premature,
   saying in a telephone interview that no decision would be finalized
   until today.  But he said Ozawa "loves opera and wants to spend more
   time with it."

   Like that of many fellow-conductors, Ozawa's tenure has hardly been
   free of controversy.  In 1997 and 1998, the Tanglewood summer festival
   under his direction was roiled by Ozawa's struggle to remove his
   artistic director at the Tanglewood Music Center.

   Under Ozawa's leadership, the Boston Symphony cemented a reputation
   as one of the world's leading ensembles, touring widely, helping to
   develop Tanglewood as a premier summer music festival, and building
   on an endowment that rose from under $10,000,000 in the early 1970's
   to more than $200,000,000 today.

   Ozawa, an often gentle, unflappable presence to the point sometimes
   of aloofness, expanded the orchestra's traditional French repertory
   to include the German, particularly the Mahler works and 20th- century
   music by Olivier Messiaen, Toru Takemitsu and others.  In recent
   years he has been spending more time conducting in Vienna.

   The 1998-99 season-long celebration of Ozawa's 25th anniversary with
   the Symphony drew varying critical assessments.  Writing in The New
   York Times in November, James R.  Oestreich praised his conducting
   of the biting, driving "Miraculous Mandarin" by Bartok as "being just
   the sort of thing in which Ozawa excels." Mahler's "Lied von der
   Erde" was also "music after Ozawa's heart, big and bold."

   But in February at Carnegie Hall, another Times critic, Bernard
   Holland, detected "a certain weariness" and said that Ozawa made
   the Beethoven Violin Concerto "sound almost vulgar"

   In an article in The Wall Street Journal last December, Greg Sandow
   likened the Boston Symphony under Ozawa to "a painting that badly
   needs to be restored."

   Ozawa, in a letter to the Boston players, called his years as music
   director "the most rewarding artistic experience that any musician
   could ever hope to have." He said he would never leave the Boston
   Symphony "for another orchestra," but that "in my own growth as a
   musician, I increasingly have come to love the operatic repertoire."

   The Boston Symphony said that Ozawa will assume his position in Vienna
   after the end of the 2002 Tanglewood summer season, for an initial
   term of three years, and that he would be in residence in Vienna five
   months a year.

   The Vienna State Opera traces its history to the court opera of the
   Hapsburgs in the mid-1800s and its intrigues with conductors and
   music directors over the years have been the stuff of music lore and
   history.  It has been without a music director for several years
   since the departure of Abbado.  In an unusual arrangement, the opera's
   musicians also constitute the famously independent and self-governing
   Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which operates without a music director
   and engages its own visiting conductors.

   Nicholas T.  Zervas, the president of the Boston Symphony's trustees,
   said, "Vienna's gain is certainly Boston's loss," and voiced hope
   that Ozawa would return to lead the orchestra as his schedule allowed.

   But that may be not easy.  With so many leading orchestras on the
   hunt for new leadership, it has become a seller's market, even at
   salaries of $1,000,000 and up a year.

   Ozawa, who was traveling yesterday as a guest conductor with the
   Vienna Philharmonic in Baden-Baden, Germany, began his music career
   in Shenyang, China.  In 1959, at age 24, he won first prize at a
   competition of conductors in France, drawing him to the attention of
   Charles Muench, then music director of the Boston Symphony, who
   invited him to Tanglewood, where he won another conducting prize.

   While working with Karajan in West Berlin he drew the attention of
   Leonard Bernstein, music director of the New York Philharmonic, who
   named him assistant conductor in New York for the 1961-62 season.
   Ozawa conducted the Boston Symphony for the first time at Tanglewood
   in 1964, became artistic director of Tanglewood in 1970 and music
   director of the Boston Symphony three years later.

   On July 4, he is to lead the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra in its
   traditional "1812 Overture" overlooking the Charles River.

Dave
[log in to unmask]
http://www.classical.net/