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
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