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The Boston Globe OnlineBoston.com Living|Arts

On the record: the discography reveals his history and ours

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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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