Seiji Ozawa: a pioneer who has dedicated his life to Western music

For a couple of decades, Seiji Ozawa was one of the most familiar faces in American classical music. Turn on your TV, or look in your record store, and you’d see him: the mane of Beatles-like hair, the signature turtleneck in lieu of a starched shirt, the emotive energetic gestures. He ruled the Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of America’s most venerable and honoured orchestras, for a record 29 years. He recorded just about everything.

Iconic though he is, people have a hard time pinning him down. He conducted with technical brilliance but didn’t have a repertory speciality – he did it all. He has been a wonderful teacher and led the training programme at the Tanglewood Festival, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home, but doesn’t have a clear legacy. He was a great American conductor but remained Japanese through and through.

Now, he’s a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors, which turns the spotlight anew on such questions and will, possibly, help find the answers.

“You always knew it was an Ozawa concert,” says Tom Rolfs, the BSO’s principal trumpet, whom Ozawa hired in 1991. “He had a sense of driving rhythm under everything else that was going on. He had a sense of ferocity. He brought you into his world and moved us along.”

“There aren’t a lot of truly great conductors,” Rolfs adds. “But he was one of them.”

Ozawa has been called enigmatic. Some interviewers have found him distant and off-putting. Many have complained that his English, even after so many years in the States, never got very good.