Back to some domestic history this week. A concert from the 1978-1979 season of the Boston Symphony, led by Music Director Seiji Ozawa and recorded on February 14, 1978.
Two works are featured: Frank Martin – Concerto for Seven wind instruments, tympani, percussion and string orchestra and Mahler’s Symphony Number 1.
Seiji Ozawa was known internationally for his work as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and especially the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), where he served from 1973 for 29 years. After conducting the Vienna New Year’s Concert in 2002, he was director of the Vienna State Opera until 2010. In Japan, he founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra in 1984, their festival in 1992, and the Tokyo Opera Nomori in 2005.
Ozawa rose to fame after he won the 1959 Besançon competition. He was invited by Charles Munch, then the music director of the BSO, for the following year to Tanglewood, the orchestra’s summer home, where he studied with Munch and Pierre Monteux. Winning the festival’s Koussevitzky Prize earned him a scholarship with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic and brought him to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who made him his assistant with the New York Philharmonic in 1961. He became artistic director of the festival and education program in Tanglewood in 1970, together with Gunther Schuller. In 1994, the new main hall there was named after him.
Ozawa conducted world premieres such as György Ligeti‘s San Francisco Polyphony in 1975 and Olivier Messiaen‘s opera Saint François d’Assise in Paris in 1983. He received numerous international awards. Ozawa was the first Japanese conductor recognized internationally and the only one of superstar status.
Although he was largely self-taught, Frank Martin, known for his rhythm expertise, taught for a long time at the institute of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the creator of eurhythmics (a concept in which music is learned and experienced through movement). He even asked Martin to succeed him as head of his school, an honour which he declined in order to ensure his artistic independence. Martin was later appointed to teach at the Geneva Conservatoire and also set up the Technicum Moderne de Musique, where he met Maria Boeke who would later become his wife.
His leading role in the Swiss composers’ circuit was apparent by his activities within all musical genres and the international interest in his work since the 1940’s. In 1946 he left Switzerland and settled in The Netherlands, home-country of Maria, with whom he would have two children (he already had a son and three daughters from previous marriages). Initially he settled in Amsterdam, later he moved to Naarden where he devoted himself to composing in peace and where he remained until his death in 1974. The only appointment he accepted during his years in The Netherlands was that of teacher of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne from 1950 to 1957. One of his pupils there was Karlheinz Stockhausen, who soon disassociated himself because of their incompatible ideas about the twelve-tone technique.
Characteristic of Martin’s style of composition is an extreme lyricism, where melodic lines, often very pronounced and intense, are supported by constantly changing chords in the bass. Neither tonal nor atonal in the strict sense, his music demonstrates a most original response to the question which concerned all of the most important composers of the 20th century.
Gustav Mahler is one of the most frequently performed composers in international concert life today. Against the background of a performance and reception history of more than a hundred years, this situation gives rise to a comprehensive review of different approaches to Mahler’s work, above all in dialogue with current innovative research approaches, such as the analysis of performances of his works. For Mahler, composing and conducting were inextricably linked, above all in his symphonies, which led to numerous modifications and clarifications in the musical text, representing changes in his aesthetic ideas. Analyzing and evaluating these changes is one of the main tasks of the New Critical Complete Edition (NKG), which plays a central role in the tasks of the International Gustav Mahler Society.
Enjoy the concert.
