Seiji Ozawa
Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa died on Tuesday at age of 88, NHK reported today. The cause of death was listed as heart failure, the national broadcaster said.
Ozawa showed interest in Western music as a child in Japan and hoped to become a pianist. At age 16 he sustained injuries to his hands and turned to conducting, studying with Hideo Saito at the Toho School in Tokyo. In 1959 he went to Europe, where he won the Besançon International Conductors’ Competition. During the following summer he studied with Charles Munch at the Berkshire Music Center (now Tanglewood [Massachusetts] Music Center). There he won the Koussevitzky Prize, awarded to the best student conductor.
Ozawa was music director of the Ravinia Festival in Chicago from 1964 to 1968, of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1965 to 1969, and of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra from 1970 to 1976. For an extraordinarily long period (1973–2002) Ozawa served as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In 1984 he established the Saito Kinen Orchestra to honour his teacher at the Toho School, and in 1992 he cofounded the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto, Japan. He was principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera from 2002 to 2010. Early in 2010 Ozawa underwent surgery for esophageal cancer, which forced him to retreat from the public stage for the better part of the year. Ozawa made his return to public performance at the Saito Kinen Festival that September, conducting the opening movement for each of four orchestral programs. Ongoing health issues continued to severely restrict his performance schedule, but he nonetheless made occasional appearances, notably at the Saito Kinen Festival, which was renamed the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival in his honour in 2015.
