The Ozawa legacy

Can the BSO find the right replacement?

by Lloyd Schwartz

I never thought it would happen. Despite the rumors that Seiji Ozawa's departure from Boston was imminent once he'd surpassed Serge Koussevitzky's BSO record for longevity (1924-1949), I was convinced Ozawa would remain here until he retired. He seemed lonely, isolated by his own choice from his family in Japan and from the local community as well. He evidently never decided to improve his English. So why would he want to stay -- except that he was conducting one of the world's great orchestras and certainly making a great deal of money? Then why would he want to leave?

But he got the offer he couldn't refuse -- the offer he wanted not to refuse. He was invited to take over -- in three years -- an even older, larger, and more prestigious institution: the Vienna State Opera. Hasn't he been saying for years that he wanted to conduct more opera? Now he'll be running one of the world's greatest opera companies.

"Running" is a funny word to use for Ozawa. One of his failures as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been lack of leadership. Did he ever really "run" the BSO? Did he ever make a decision on his own about repertoire or guest artists? One of the surprises about his recent heavy-handed shake-up in the administration of the Tanglewood Music Center was how uncharacteristically draconian a gesture it was -- and I still wonder whether this was his own idea or whether he was acting with someone else's encouragement.

After 25 years, large -- the largest -- questions remain unanswered. Ozawa is currently the longest-tenured music director in the world. What did he come to represent? Did he have any encompassing ideas about music? What did music mean to him? A friend asked me recently whether there's any piece of music that Ozawa ever played better than anyone else. (There isn't.) What recordings did he make that anyone will want to play in 10 years? Or next year? (Even the record companies don't seem very interested.) Did he have any concept of the function of a symphony orchestra? What did the BSO represent to him? What did his orchestra mean to this city, or to the world? In 25 years, why did he perform so rarely with local organizations other than the BSO? (I count one performance with students at the New England Conservatory; two concerts -- years ago -- with Collage, the new-music group with a large contingent of BSO players; and a handful of Bach cantatas at Emmanuel Church.) Did he do anything that made him indispensable to Boston? To the world? To music? What is his intellectual and artistic "legacy"?

Think about what some other living conductors represent. Pierre Boulez stands for the idea that all music, new or old -- Baroque, Classical, Romantic, or 20th-century -- relates to our world, and that it must be played with style and flair, flow and precision (a view that used to be mistaken for lack of warmth -- but perhaps the greatest and warmest, most moving Haydn performance I've ever heard was a recent broadcast of Boulez conducting Haydn's last symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic). Sir Simon Rattle put the English industrial city of Birmingham on the international musical map with his ambitious and inventive programming, his community involvement, and his commitment to contemporary music and to building the orchestra. For years, Rattle had been the hoped-for replacement for Ozawa among those music lovers who still had hopes for the BSO. Boston audiences cheered his thoughtful and exciting concerts, and he apparently wanted to come here. His appointment as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic was announced the same day as Ozawa's resignation. Boston has lost its most promising possibility for reclamation.

There's also Claudio Abbado, who was evidently the candidate the BSO players turned down 25 years ago in favor of Ozawa, and who represents an idea of elegance, spirituality, and excitement. Christoph von Dohnányi, just stepping down as music director of the greatest American ensemble, the Cleveland Orchestra, stands for a clean, clear sound, lack of melodrama, and European traditionalism combined with out-of-the-way programming (the BSO players evidently hated him when he last conducted them). Carlos Kleiber, the eccentric but brilliant son of another distinguished conductor, stands for an idea of perfectionism. Kurt Sanderling, a European elder statesman, stands for a traditional style delivered with loving intimacy, delicacy, and variety. The Met's James Levine stands for an idea of passion and fire and "voice." The Boston Philharmonic's Benjamin Zander stands for a devotion to the central European repertoire and the ideal of total conviction, intellectual understanding, and the uninhibited intensity of each moment.

Boulez, Rattle, Oliver Knussen (the lively, volatile British composer and brilliant conductor who recently stepped down as director of Tanglewood's New Music Festival), Michael Tilson Thomas (once a controversial candidate for BSO music director who now leads the San Francisco Symphony), and Gunther Schuller are exciting, thoughtful conductors committed to the necessity of exploring and discovering 20th-century and contemporary music; the latter two are especially concerned with promoting music by living American composers. All these conductors LEAD. They perform with a sense of mission and a sense of nuance, of intellectual and emotional intention, that Ozawa has never seemed interested in.

What does Ozawa stand for? Putting on a good show? Knock-'em-dead endings? In a radio interview last week, former Boston Globe critic and BSO program annotator Michael Steinberg called it the "repertoire of flash." Ozawa has often been more praised for his "traffic control" of large orchestral forces than for the quality of his musical insights. He was better at Ravel than at Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (whom he conducted very rarely), Schumann, or Brahms. His Bach was deplorable. He achieved a reputation for 20th-century showpieces, but his Stravinsky was as boring and empty as his Beethoven except for the fast, loud endings. In a rehearsal of the Berg Violin Concerto, it was embarrassing to see that he didn't know the orchestral accompaniment is a Viennese waltz (the soloist, Itzhak Perlman, had to lean forward and explain). He commissioned and led some significant new works (Messiaen, Sessions, Tippett, Dutilleux, Kirchner, Harbison), but none as significant as Koussevitzky's commissioning of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms or Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, and there was rarely any follow-through. The performances more often than not seemed dutiful rather than committed, let alone inspired.

New York magazine's Peter G. Davis once compared Ozawa to an actor reciting Shakespeare who actually understood no English. Last year, Wall Street Journal critic Gregory Sandow, in a blistering attack on Ozawa, talked about how you couldn't hear any relation between the emotions Ozawa was acting out on the podium and what the orchestra was producing. In recent years, the spin emanating from Symphony Hall depicted a "new Seiji," a more serious musician who was working harder on understanding rather than merely memorizing scores (after scores of scoreless, superficially memorized performances that often depended on rhythmic oversimplification), concentrating harder, making bigger demands in rehearsals, and playing a more active part in the decision making. Some critics buy this, but I didn't hear much difference between the "new Seiji" and the old one, though there was maybe a little less of the old coarseness (depending on the particular personnel of the winds and brasses).

There have been a few important new additions to the ensemble, like flutist Jacques Zoon, who has plenty of personality along with the technical wizardry. There might be (but I'm not sure) a generally higher level of technique. But where are the players who give the orchestra a profile? It's revealing that the Wall Street Journal article triggered a series of belated potshots by a previously complacent New York press. Just a few weeks ago, the New Yorker's Alex Ross, lamenting the loss of a distinctive sound in American orchestras, wrote that "Seiji Ozawa, for example, continues to pilot the Boston Symphony toward mediocrity."

I won't miss Ozawa. I've yearned too long for his resignation. Although the sudden announcement of his departure makes me feel sadder than I expected at 25 years of unfulfilled promise. I was certainly as excited as anyone -- perhaps more than most -- over Ozawa's initial appointment. It was an act of courage on the BSO's part to take a chance on a young musician (he was 38) of non-European descent who had long hair and wore beads and turtlenecks, the trappings of a new generation, in contrast to the conservative, elderly, white, Eurocentric males who had dominated the orchestra since its inception.

But I soon lost heart. My two favorite Ozawa concerts were given within his first two seasons. Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, that overflowing fairy-tale cantata, got a splendid reading at Tanglewood in the summer of 1974, with a stunning cast (Phyllis Curtin, George London, James McCracken). A tape of that performance holds up -- and not just the singing. But when Ozawa did it again four years later at Symphony Hall, for a recording, it was a bloated, leaden disaster. In his second season, Ozawa and another excellent cast (including the late Jan de Gaetani) and the then dazzling BSO woodwinds caught the childlike delight of Ravel's children's opera, L'enfant et les sortilèges -- it's one of his few successes that (in 1996) he succeeded in recapturing.

But by the time I first started reviewing Ozawa, in 1977, I was already disillusioned. I was so turned off, I sometimes feared I couldn't be objective. I once drove around listening to a terrible Beethoven performance on my car radio, waiting to learn who was conducting. The more I listened, the more certain I became that it was Ozawa. And I was right -- I passed the blindfold test and confirmed my confidence in my objectivity.

But maybe the quality of the musicmaking didn't really matter. Wasn't it the image, the charming personality, the beads, the smile, the athletic ballet of gestures that made Ozawa popular? And isn't the popularity itself, not the talent, the self-feeding reason for his fame, not only in Boston but around the world -- even in Vienna?

Still, I wish him well. It would be good for him to feel excited about a new future. I hope the liberation he must now feel also will mean livelier, freer performances during the three years before he leaves.

But I'm nervous about his replacement. I don't trust the BSO to make the best choice. And with the loss of Rattle, there's no obvious candidate. With few exceptions, most of the available aspirants are as faceless, or careerist, as Ozawa. Who would have the ambition to play a significantly more active part in the Boston community, or to work intensively to develop the orchestra's individuality, especially when a high-profile job like this brings along with it frequent alluring offers of guest-conducting in more glamorous places (Ozawa being the number-one example -- how else could he get his offer from Vienna?). How tempting for the BSO to opt for a musical nonentity like Neeme Järvi, who (perhaps for this very reason) seems to produce a new recording every week. Pianist/conductor Christoph Eschenbach and James Conlon are more-serious musicians, and perhaps more-serious contenders. The orchestra apparently likes playing for them, though their recent guest stints were not among this season's more memorable events.

A name almost everyone mentions is Robert Spano, Ozawa's former assistant conductor and now music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He's an exciting, "edgy" (in the word of one Boston composer) musician who is just shy of Ozawa's age when he took over the BSO. Apparently most of the players don't think he's ready. It would be taking a big chance. But what wouldn't be?

The loss of Ozawa is big news. But the bigger news is the prospect of desperately needed change. The director of a world-class orchestra ought to be an intellectual and artistic leader, one capable of making a vital contribution to both local and world culture -- though very few living music directors have made such a mark, or even seem to want to make one. Boston is now competing with numerous other major orchestras currently in the same about-to-be-rudderless boat. It's not the happiest prospect given the current pool of choices and the bottom-line, play-it-safe policies our decision makers usually take. Yet, what an exciting opportunity this sudden new opportunity could be.