Word: ozawa
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...terrace overlooking Lake Fuschl near Salzburg, Seiji Ozawa and Yo-Yo Ma are deep in conversation. "Remember that discussion about whether an Oriental can do Western music?" asks the Japanese conductor in heavily accented English. Ma does. "Music can be learned, really, by anybody who cares to know it well enough and deeply enough," says the cellist, who is of Chinese parentage but as American as a baseball...
...more important than being an individual. That becomes hard when you have a talent. You have to speak up, you have to say, 'I have an opinion.' But when I'm in the Orient, I'm not supposed to have an opinion. I try to respect the differences." Ozawa, 51, looks at his young colleague uneasily. "Can you do that?" he wonders, and then suddenly addresses an unseen camera. "This question is very serious," he says. "This is very private." Blackout...
This unusual glimpse into guarded emotions can be found in Ozawa, airing on PBS March 27. Shot in 1984 by Albert and the late David Maysles, it is a backstage look at one of classical music's best-known yet least understood figures. Ozawa has been music director of the Boston Symphony since 1973, and as one of the world's top maestros, he appears in such musical capitals as Berlin, Paris and Milan. Yet the first East Asian to succeed in a quintessentially Western art form remains solidly Japanese in temperament and outlook. It is this clash of cultures...
...Japanese dentist in Occupied Manchuria, Ozawa was exposed to Western music at an early age, and his musical education continued after the family moved back to Japan in 1944. What did it matter that classical music in Japan had a very short history? "Western music is so organized," Ozawa observed last month in Paris, where he was conducting at the Opera. "It is so strong and so logical that it is very easy for every nationality to learn." At the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo, Ozawa studied conducting with Hideo Saito, who had been a pupil of Cellist...
Accordingly, when Ozawa came to the West in 1959 for further study, he knew he had much to learn. What he did not expect was the astonishment that his career presumption would engender. Germans are suspicious enough when an Italian performs Beethoven; what could a Japanese know? "I realized that what I was doing was strange only when I got to Europe," remembers Ozawa...