Conversation on music

Conductor Seiji Ozawa

Cover of "Talk About Music with Mr. Seiji Ozawa" / Courtesy of Gimm-Young Publishers

By Do Je-hae

"Talk About Music With Mr. Seiji Ozawa" is unlike any other book I have read on classical music.

It is not a biography or a memoir of a musician, but a transcript of conversations between two Japanese giants in different fields. Conductor Seiji Ozawa and novelist Haruki Murakami had come together to talk about a lifelong passion for music.

A star novelist writing extensively about classical music is something I have not seen in Korea. I have always marveled at Murakami's incredible depth of knowledge in classical music.

His 2013 best-selling novel is a direct homage to the piano masterpiece "Years of Pilgrimage" by Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. One of Liszt's greatest compositions, the pilgrimage series were inspired by some of the places he visited in the 1830s and 1840s and captured his personal reflections from scenes he witnessed. They are extremely difficult to play but lovely to listen to.

Murakami's "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" was at the top of the nation's best-seller lists for five consecutive weeks here after its release in July 2013. The Murakami boom had led to a sudden surge of sales in Liszt recordings.

I had taken that opportunity to write a long piece on Liszt in our culture page. As I wrote I remember wondering how many Korean novelists were aware of the "Years of Pilgrimage," and even if they knew it, would they have the imagination to incorporate that into their literary work? Since then, I have hoped that Murakami would write something on classical music and share his immense knowledge with readers.

"Talk About Music With Mr. Seiji Ozawa," released here last month, reflects Murakami's passion for the history and recordings of classical music. He takes on the role of interviewer and Ozawa the interviewee. Murakami asks very good questions and Ozawa's answers are full of insight.

The 361-page book was a very swift read for a classical music writer and avid fan like myself. The book is unsuitable for beginning classical music listeners because it contains a lot of names and pieces that could be unfamiliar for the generable public.

The book covers various topics, like how Mahler because a standard in the symphonic repertoire after being ignored for many years or the leadership differences between conductors Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein.

Ozawa is the first Asian conductor to lead one of the major U.S. orchestras. He is known for his 25-year tenure with the Boston Symphony. He is highly admired in Europe, especially in Berlin and Vienna.

From this book, I learned some details about Ozawa's early years, particularly during his time at the New York Philharmonic as Bernstein's assistant conductor.

He credits his success as a conductor from to the teachings of his teacher in Japan, Hideo Saito (1902-1974), whom Ozawa had met at Tokyo's Toho Gakuen Shcool of Music founded in 1948.

I had assumed that like Chung Myung-whun, the first Korean conductor to become a global name, Ozawa had studied in the U.S. Ozawa found high-profile conducting opportunities not long after he left Japan, which demonstrates the quality of education he got in his homeland even in the 1950s. This, I found, was very impressive. The handful number of Korean conductors who have international careers like Chung are still mostly foreign-trained.

When Murakami asks Ozawa how a young Japanese conductor was able to land jobs at the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, the first thing Ozawa does it to talk about his teacher.

"That's because I had solid teaching from Saito," said Ozawa. "The technique he had taught me was firmly planted in me, even from a very young age."

"Even though I didn't speak the language, I was able to deliver my musical message to foreign orchestras because I had the necessary conducting technique -- the basics I had honed under Saito.

A unique aspect about this book was backstage stories about musicians Ozawa had worked with, like Joseph Silverstein, the concertmaster of the Boston Symphony at the time Ozawa had arrived in Boston in 1973. Due to musical differences between the two, Silverstein eventually left Boston and founded the Utah Symphony.

I had heard Silverstein during a chamber music concert at the Alice Tully Hall in New York in a riveting performance of Mozart's clarinet quintet in the early 1990s. I never knew that the violinist had such history with Ozawa and the Boston Symphony before reading this book.

Because Ozawa is a conductor, readers may assume that the conversations would focus heavily on symphonies. There is a lot of talk about pianists and piano music, particularly Beethoven's third piano concerto. Ozawa and Murakami discuss the different interpretations of this piece by legendary pianists like Rudolf Serkin and Glenn Gould as well as Mitsuko Uchida, the undisputed queen of the First Viennese School on the stage today. Ozawa spends a significant portion of the book talking about the relationship between Gould and Bernstein.

An entire chapter is devoted to how Mahler became so popular.

The book is a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to know what was happening in mainstream classical music scene in the 1960 through the 1980s.