On the record: the discography reveals his history and ours
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 09/20/98
Seiji Ozawa made his first recording in 1962, when he led a disc of
African-American spirituals with the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus.
Since then, Ozawa has recorded more than 286 works by 86 composers,
ranging from little pieces by Ravel to massive masterpieces by Messiaen,
Mahler, and Schoenberg. Ozawa has led at least 15 orchestras on recordings,
including the four he has served as music director (Toronto, San Francisco,
and Saito Kinen, in addition to Boston).
Pride of place in Ozawa's discography goes to nearly 150 works he has
recorded over the span of a quarter-century with the Boston Symphony
Orchestra -- a few of them more than once. Ozawa's recording debut with the
BSO came in 1969, before he was appointed music director. That RCA
recording of Orff's "Carmina Burana" is still available (the next recording,
made a week later, of Stravinsky's "Petrouchka," is no longer around, though
it has accrued historical interest -- the pianist in the young Ozawa's
performance was the even younger Michael Tilson Thomas). The most recent
Ozawa/BSO recording, and the orchestra's first "CD single," was made
"live" last season: Henri Dutilleux's "The shadows of time."
Ozawa's discography reflects his history, interests, and repertory -- and, like
most discographies, it distorts his accomplishment because it reflects the
prejudices and priorities of the recording industry as well as his own. In his
entire career, Ozwaa has recorded only two symphonies by Mozart, only
three by Beethoven, two by Dvorak, and none by Mendelssohn, Schumann,
Sibelius, or Shostakovich. On the other hand, if it's major cycles you want,
he's recorded the Mahler symphonies with the BSO, the Prokofiev
symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Brahms symphonies with the
Saito Kinen Orchestra. With the BSO he has recorded many of the significant
works of Bartok, Berlioz, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Richard Strauss.
Recordings of the works Ozawa premiered will prove to have the most
historic value in his discography. Of these, the most important was Messiaen's
opera "St. Francois d'Assise," which he recorded at the Paris Opera. Over
the years he recorded 13 works by his friend Toru Takemitsu, a few of them
with the BSO. His BSO recordings of new music include the violin concertos
of Earl Kim and Robert Starer, the First Symphony of John Harbison, Roger
Sessions's Pulitzer Prize-winning Concerto for Orchestra, Panufnik's
"Sinfonia votiva," Olly Wilson's "Sinfonia," Peter Lieberson's Piano
Concerto (with Peter Serkin), and the Dutilleux work.
The record industry's fondness for the vocal and instrumental stars it has
helped create has kept Ozawa and the BSO competitive in the recording
marketplace; many leading soloists request Ozawa for their recordings. There
are notable documentations of his partnerships with Rudolf Serkin (the
Beethoven Concerto cycle with the BSO); Peter Serkin; Frederica von Stade
(her 1979 Ravel "Sheherazade" was the BSO's first digital recording); Jessye
Norman; Itzhak Perlman (concerti by Berg, Stravinsky, Barber, and others);
Anne-Sophie Mutter; Gidon Kremer; Leon Fleisher; Yo-Yo Ma (Strauss's
"Don Quixote"); and Krystian Zimerman (the major Liszt works for piano
and orchestra and the Rachmaninoff cycle that is still in progress).
Ozawa and the BSO have made a few disposable and forgettable records,
and some for purely commercial reasons (Ozawa has never programmed
Offenbach's "Gaite parisienne" or the ballet music from Gounod's "Faust" for
Symphony Hall, but he has recorded them). He has not recorded all of his
greatest achievements -- his enchanting performance of Ravel's "L'Enfant et
les sortileges" was scheduled for recording two years ago, but the sessions
were canceled for financial reasons.
A number of the available CDs hold up against the competition, chief among
them Bartok's complete ballet "The Miraculous Mandarin" (it was Ozawa's
performance of this piece that cinched the BSO music directorship for him).
The Mahler box would probably not be any listener's first choice for the
complete cycle, but no recorded cycle by any other conductor is wholly
successful because no conductor has been equally at home in all of the works.
Ozawa is at his best in the Second, the Third, the Eighth, and the Ninth, and
his versions of those works deserve an honorable position in the catalog.
Ozawa has always excelled in large-scale pieces, and his recording of the
Berlioz Requiem documents this aspect of his work compellingly; one of his
best recordings is of Schoenberg's "Gurrelieder. " At an opposite extreme,
his subtle recording of the Faure "Requiem" is very beautiful and in-drawing.
The 1978 recording of Tchaikovsky's complete "Swan Lake" features
captivating solos by most of the legendary principals he inherited; the 1990
recording of "Nutcracker" reveals the comparable qualities of the orchestra
he has created.
Ozawa's career began in the LP era and has spanned both the CD boom and
the subsequent bust of the classical music recording business. Some BSO
players like to complain about the reduction in recording activity and to blame
it on Ozawa rather than on the fees mandated by their own union. In fact,
none of the other major American orchestras has recorded a great deal more
than the BSO in the last 25 years, and Ozawa continues to record actively in
Europe and Japan, where it is less expensive.
One result of the crisis in the record industry is that about half the
Ozawa/BSO discography has slipped out of print in this country, which seems
to be about par for the course (most of James Levine's records with the
Chicago Symphony, for example, which were recorded at the same time as
the early Ozawa/BSO discs, are also long gone). Some of the deletions
include ambitious and important recordings, like Strauss's "Elektra," and
Berlioz's "Romeo et Juliette," which won a Grand Prix du Disque in 1977,
and some are surprising, like the comparatively recent 1993 recording of
Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto with superstar Evgeny Kissin. Even
some of Ozawa's signature interpretations with the BSO are currently
unavailable -- Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," Ravel's complete
"Daphnis and Chloe" (although the Second Suite remains), and the major
Stravinsky ballet scores ("Firebird," "Petrouchka," "The Rite of Spring"),
among others -- although his Toronto recording of the Berlioz remains in print,
and so does his Chicago performance of "The Rite of Spring."
Some other interesting and significant records are also gone, like the 1992
disc of orchestral transcriptions of music by Bach; one of this writer's favorites
among Ozawa's recordings is a deleted 1988 Faure disc that marked the
recording debut of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt. Mstislav Rostropovich
believes the deleted 1985 version of the Dvorak Concerto he recorded with
Ozawa and the BSO for Erato is the best of his many recordings of that work.
The American market is not the world market, however, so it's relatively easy
to find imports of many "unavailable" Ozawa/BSO recordings in the larger
record stores. Ozawa's first recording as music director, Berlioz's "The
Damnation of Faust," had a short shelf life back in 1974, but you can find it in
the bins today, even though it's not listed in the catalog. Only five of the
Mahler symphonies are officially available, but copies of the imported box of
the complete cycle are around (selling for the fairly hefty import price of about
$250). Some early Ozawa/BSO recordings have been reissued as bargain
historical documents, like most of the Ravel cycle he recorded in the mid-'70s,
which now appears in a twofer.
WBGH producer Byron Bell has created a meticulous log of all the BSO's
recording sessions, and it includes some Ozawa/BSO recordings that were
never released -- Berlioz's "Roman Carnival" Overture; Brahms's Second
Symphony; Rossini's "Semiramide" Overture; Vaughan Williams's "The Lark
Ascending"; Paganini's "Moto Perpetuo" (a popular tour encore for the BSO
strings); Chopin's First Piano Concerto with Alexis Weissenberg; Poulenc's
Harpsichord Concerto with Trevor Pinnock; Messiaen's "Oiseaux exotiques"
with Mitsuko Uchida; and an important Jessye Norman record (Britten's
"Phaedra," Haydn's "Scena di Berenice," and Berlioz's "La Mort de
Cleopatre"). The diva has not approved this for release because she is not
happy with some of her own singing in one of the selections. A record of
music for children by Prokofiev, Saint-Saens, and Britten was issued only in
Japan, and Ozawa delivered the narration of "Peter and the Wolf" himself.
Ozawa's family physician, the late Dr. Shin-Ichiro Ebihara, maintained a
complete discography, which lists some vanished recordings one would love
to hear -- Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto with the great German pianist
Wilhelm Kempff and the Toronto Symphony; Bartok's First and Third Piano
Concertos with Peter Serkin and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra -- along
with some that sound merely peculiar, like a Gershwin album he recorded with
pianist Alexis Weissenberg. Gershwin could hardly have imagined the day
when the Berlin Philharmonic would record "An American in Paris" or
"Rhapsody in Blue" with a Bulgarian-French pianist under a Japanese
conductor, but this is characteristic of our modern musical world.
The Ebihara discography is important for its listing of Ozawa's early
recordings in Japan (which include some advanced contemporary music by
Ligeti and Xenakis) and as a reminder of some of the most important
non-BSO discs, such as operatic recordings (Bizet's "Carmen" and Strauss's
"Salome," both with Jessye Norman), Offenbach's "The Tales of Hoffmann"
(with Placido Domingo and Edita Gruberova), Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex"
and "The Rake's Progress" with the Saito Kinen Festival, in addition to the
performances of "Elektra" and Tchaikovsky's "Pique-Dame" he recorded
with the BSO.
Dr. Ebihara's work also lists Ozawa's videotape/laserdisc activity. Only a few
BSO performances have been commercially available in the visual media
(Brahms's First Symphony and Strauss's "Also sprach Zarathustra" on a
laserdisc and a program of Dvorak's greatest hits taped in Prague with
Frederica von Stade, Itzhak Perlman, and Yo-Yo Ma). With other ensembles
Ozawa has recorded videotapes or laserdisc performances of Honegger's
"Jeanne d'Arc au bucher" and Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex" (Saito Kinen),
Puccini's "Tosca" (with Kiri Te Kanawa at the Paris Opera), Orff's
"Carmina Burana" with the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as orchestral works
with Saito Kinen, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony
Orchestra.
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