Seiji Ozawa, the longtime music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has died at 88.
Born to Japanese parents in Mukden during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, Ozawa was schooled in piano and conducting in Japan. After winning the International Competition of Orchestra Conductors in Besançon, France, he was invited to the Tanglewood Music Center, where he continued conducting studies with Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux. After further study with Herbert von Karajan in Berlin, Ozawa was appointed by Leonard Bernstein as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in the early 1960s.
Ozawa was music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-69) and the San Francisco Symphony (1970-77) before his appointment in Boston in 1973, becoming one of the first Asians to take musical charge of a major US or European orchestra. He led the Boston Symphony until 2002, the longest tenure of any music director in the orchestra’s history. He also was a regular guest conductor with an worldwide itinerary.
In his later years, Ozawa concentrated on performances and recordings with Japan’s Saito Kinen Orchestra, which he had co-founded in 1984.
From the late 1960s onward, Ozawa amassed an extensive discography, conducting Boston, Saito Kinen and other orchestras. Although he was not closely associated with the core Austro-German classics, he won widespread praise for discs of late-romantic and modern music, especially of Mahler and Ravel. His recordings of Tōru Takemitsu’s works were key to bringing the Japanese composer to worldwide notice.
An obituary in The New York Times by James R. Oestreich:
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