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Library of Congress Card Numbers R67-3930—31 (Mono)

and R67-3932—33 (Stereo) apply to this recording.

BrittenTHE YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA

Ce SCN de] Co

His star has become fixed in the firmament of master conductors On a sultry Saturday night in July 1963 a spokesman for the Chicago

Ravinia Festival announced to a pavilionful of concert goers that the next

week’s announced guest conductor had cabled his cancellation because of

bursitis. The replacement would be a Japanese protégé of Leonard Bern-

stein who had just scored substantially in Lewisohn Stadium with the

New York Philharmonic. His name was Seiji Ozawa, and the Times had liked him. Chicago's

reaction that night to a 27-year-old musician then unknown in the

American Midwest was a mixture of shrugs, arched eyebrows and dis-

appointed scowls. Three evenings later, on July 16, a lithe young man

with a mop head of black hair—seeming at concert range to be no older

than a teen—walked quickly, almost sidewise in the manner of a sand-

crab, from stage entrance to podium wearing a hopeful smile and a

nattily tailored summer uniform.

The concert he summoned from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was

historic, although none of the music had figured previously in his public

repertoire. History repeated itself at a second performance on July 18.

The orchestra was visibly enthusiastic (Fritz Reiner’s retirement as down-

town music director had only just begun), uncommonly disciplined,

extraordinarily distinguished in response to the boy-man at its helm and

emotionally ready at the end of the second program to salute him with a

fanfare. Except that 27-year-olds, however gifted and persuasive, usually

must live another 27 years before their reward is a tusch. The Ravinia

trustees, however, did not mute their approval. On August 22, 1963—

ten days shy of his 28th birthday — Seiji Ozawa was awarded a three-year

contract as musical director of the festival (a contract subsequently

extended through the 1969 season ).

With the Chicago Symphony, in the summer of 1965, Ozawa made

his first local recording: Barték’s Third Piano Concerto with Peter Serkin

as soloist, coupled by RCA Victor with the First Concerto taped a summer

later. In 1967 Ozawa was recording again in Chicago: Schonberg’s Piano

Concerto, once more with young Serkin, and the day following—July 18—

Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Moussorg-

sky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It is Ozawa’s first, without soloist, with a

ranking orchestra of the world, which has played consistently better for

him—at best gloriously, summer after summer—than for any conductor

since the late, revered Reiner. 3

In addition to his festival duties at Ravinia and guest conducting

engagements the year ‘round throughout the world, Ozawa has been

music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra since 1965, succeed-

ing Walter Susskind. Withal, his career outside of Japan did not com-

mence until 1959. |

He was born September 1, 1935, in Hoten (then Manchuria), the

AGROOVE me ck N'Y © Printed i

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- Moussorgsky-Ravel-PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Seiji Ozawa conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Produced by Peter Dellheim * Recording Engineer: Bernard Keville

third of four sons of a Buddhist dentist, who played the samisen, and a

Christian mother, who played the piano. In June of 1941 Dr. Ozawa

moved his family to Tokyo, where Seiji thereafter lived in a Catholic

mission and school. He was church organist from age 12 to 16, at the

same time studying in Tokyo’s internationally prestigious Toho School of

Music. His contemplated career as a solo pianist was cut short when the

index fingers of both hands were broken in a school rugby game. By

that time, however, conducting had captured his interest. And so he

studied with Toho’s Hideki Saito as a prize student, before leaving Japan

in January 1959 on a cargo ship bound for Europe.

Speaking no foreign languages then and with less in his pockets than

the equivalent of 100 U-S. dollars, Ozawa put ashore at the Sicilian port

of Messina. Through the Rhone valley he made his leisurely way to Paris

on a motor scooter (a “rabbit bike” he has called it). Before the year was.

out he had come to the attention of Charles Munch and had entered the

Besancon International Contest for Young Conductors, winning it ina

breeze. Upon Munch’s recommendation Ozawa was awarded a Kousse-

vitzky Memorial Scholarship to Tanglewood for the summer of 1960.

His work there attracted the interest not only of Leonard Bernstein, who

engaged him as one of three assistant conductors for the New York Phil-

harmonic in 1961, but also of Herbert von Karajan.

Ozawa spent the winter of 1960 in Berlin studying (“only Bruckner,

Mahler and Richard Strauss”) with Karajan. Back in the United States to

abet Bernstein, he demonstrated such natural command and compre-

hensive musicianship that his assistantship was extended a second season,

through the spring of 1963, and he began the meteoric ascent that has

seen his star become, before age 30, fixed in the firmament of master

conductors.

What he shall do, where he shall go when his current Toronto and

Ravinia contracts expire is conjectural. But his respect for the Chicago

Symphony Orchestra, returned in kind and volume with singular affec-

tion, is documented on this disc, recorded one steamy summer morning

and afternoon in Shriner-owned Medinah Temple, just north of Chicago's Loop, between arteries that carry city traffic to and from the western

expressways. In a little over five hours of concentrated, mutually intuitive collabora-

tion—with long (rather than short) takes prevailing—Ozawa and the

orchestra taped Britten’s variation-guide for young listeners (of all ages )

and Moussorgsky’s gallery of musical pictures based on the drawings of

Russian atchitect Victor Hartmann, in orchestral dress by Ravel. The Britten is a first recording for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,

but Pictures is an old friend. First in 1951 with Rafael Kubelik conduct-

ing, then in 1957 for RCA Victor under Reiner’s baton and now in 1967

with Seiji Ozawa the orchestra has come to grips with this music. And

come, if one may be permitted to editorialize on the evidence of recording

sessions and playback periods, closest yet to the unattainable perfection

toward which man is forever reaching, and in which exercise he realizes

that which is noblest in his nature. —ROGER DETTMER

Music and Theater Critic, Chicago’s American

Other RCA Victor recordings by Seiji Ozawa you will enjoy:

Bartok: Concertos Nos..1 and 3 Chicago Symphony Orchestra|Peter meh, Piaritit 28 seh co a LM /LSC-2929

Tchaikovsky: Concerto in D * Mendelssohn: Concerto in E Minor | London Symphony Orchestra/Erick Friedman, Violinist.. LM/LSC-2865

Schumann: Concerto in A Minor ¢ Strauss: Burleske London Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Pennario, Pianist resi eng eee Ce eS

Timings: Side 1—22:06 Side 2—8:00 (P.D.), 17:00 ( ASCAP)

Liner photos courtesy of Chicago’s American

Cover photo taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Mono LM-2977

Stereo LSC-2977

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