Seiji Ozawa, Fascinating Conductor, Is Lifeless at 88

Seiji Ozawa, the high-spirited Japanese conductor who took the Western classical music world by storm within the Sixties and ’70s and was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1973 to 2002, died on Feb. 6 in Tokyo. He was 88.

The trigger was coronary heart failure, mentioned a spokeswoman for the Seiji Ozawa Worldwide Academy Switzerland, which introduced his dying in a information launch.

Mr. Ozawa had just lately skilled well being issues. He by no means absolutely rebounded from surgical procedure for esophageal most cancers in early 2010, or from again issues that had been made worse throughout his restoration. He was additionally hospitalized with coronary heart valve illness in later years.

Mr. Ozawa was probably the most outstanding harbinger of a motion that has remodeled the classical music world over the past half-century: an incredible 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 perception widespread even amongst educated critics held that though extremely skilled Asian musicians may develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they may 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 prejudice by dint of his outsize character, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer arduous work.

Together with his mop of black hair, his boyish demeanor and his seemingly boundless power, Mr. Ozawa 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. He scored many successes through the years, proving particularly adept at huge, advanced works that many others discovered unwieldy.

He toured broadly and recorded extensively with the orchestra. However his 29-year tenure was, many thought, too lengthy for anybody’s good: his personal, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’.

Although comparatively inexperienced in opera, he left in 2002 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 in a position to obtain.

Seiji Ozawa was born to Japanese mother and father in Japanese-occupied Shenyang, China, on Sept. 1, 1935. (The household returned to Japan in 1944.) He studied piano as a toddler however gave up ideas of a pianistic profession when he broke two fingers taking part in rugby. He studied conducting underneath Hideo Saito, the pre-eminent trainer of Western music in Japan, on the Toho College of Music in Tokyo.

In 1959 he traveled to Europe on a cargo ship, bringing a motor scooter and a guitar. He gained a contest for orchestral conductors in Besançon, France, that yr, and was invited by one of many judges, Charles Munch, then the music director of the Boston Symphony, to review on the Berkshire Music Middle at Tanglewood, the orchestra’s summer season 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.

Two years later, not but well-known, he appeared on the television show “What’s My Line?,” on which movie star panelists needed to guess his occupation on the premise of yes-or-no solutions. It took them some time. However his ascent had already begun.

In 1964, he turned artistic director of the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, the summer season residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1965, Bernstein beneficial him to Walter Homburger, the managing director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, who was on the lookout 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 music director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1970 to 1976. From 1970 to 1973, he was additionally creative director of the Berkshire Music Middle at Tanglewood, sharing the place with the composer Gunther Schuller and solidifying his standing with the Boston Symphony.

Aside from conducting Boston Symphony concert events, Mr. Ozawa’s relationship with Tanglewood through the years was considerably halting however often eventful. In 1994, the orchestra constructed a powerful 1,180-seat auditorium on the campus. Norio Ohga, the president of the Sony Company, donated $2 million of the almost $10 million it value on the situation that the construction be named Seiji Ozawa Corridor.

Storm clouds gathered a number of years later, when Mr. Ozawa, after years of relative inactivity on the Tanglewood Music Middle, 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 yr outstanding school members — together with the pianists Leon Fleisher, the middle’s creative director, and Gilbert Kalish, its school chairman — left in protest, citing an absence of any clear imaginative and prescient from Mr. Ozawa.

Mr. Ozawa remained energetic in Japan throughout his Boston tenure. He turned honorary creative director of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra (now the New Japan Philharmonic) in 1980. 4 years later, he helped discovered the Saito Kinen Orchestra, a memorial to the beloved mentor of his youth. This spawned the Saito Kinen Pageant in Matsumoto in 1992; the occasion was renamed the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Pageant in 2015.

Mr. Ozawa lastly left the Boston Symphony in 2002. As its music director laureate, he returned to Boston for 2 concert events at Symphony Corridor in 2008.

He final carried out at Tanglewood in 2006. He canceled a scheduled return in 2010 for well being causes and needed to cancel once more in 2016, as a result of he lacked the mandatory bodily power on his return to Japan after conducting briefly in Europe.

Mr. Ozawa’s shift to opera got here as a shock, given his restricted expertise. 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 “Queen of Spades.”

On the Vienna State Opera, he was in a position to fill in lots of gaps left by a profession spent nearly solely in live performance halls. However he tended to keep away from the usual repertory in favor of the fringes, as in his first huge splash: a brand new manufacturing of Ernst Krenek’s jazz-tinged, Weimar-era “Jonny spielt auf” in 2003.

He was additionally in a position to 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 Corridor 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 fruits of his profession, needed to be severely curtailed.

In December 2010 he traveled to New York, hoping to conduct the Saito Kinen Orchestra in three packages at Carnegie as a part of its citywide pageant JapanNYC. However, having suffered by means of the yr with bouts of sciatica, he needed to cut back 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.”

As creative 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. However he needed to cancel this 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 Worldwide Academy Switzerland in Paris.

Full info on survivors was not instantly accessible.

Within the waning years of his life, Mr. Ozawa got here to acknowledge the knowledge that comes from years of music making.

“A musician’s special flavor comes out with age,” he mentioned in “Absolutely on Music,” a 2016 ebook of conversations between Mr. Ozawa and the novelist Haruki Murakami. “His playing at that stage may have more interesting qualities than at the height of his career.”