Харуки Мураками - Absolutely on Music

OZAWA: That’s so true! Absolutely.

MURAKAMI: How do you describe it? Silky? Open? Elastic? I was in Boston from 1993 into 1995 and attending Boston Symphony performances near the end of your time with the orchestra, and I had the impression that the sound had been cooked down to its essence, that it had become somehow denser than what I had heard before, quite different from the earlier Boston sound.

OZAWA: You may be right about that. I was pouring myself into it in those days, doing everything I could to raise the level of the orchestra’s precision. I was determined to make it one of the ten greatest orchestras in the world. I wanted to bring the finest possible guest conductors to Boston. To do that, I knew I would have to improve the orchestra. And in fact, the orchestra did win the favor of a lot of conductors, who agreed to come and perform for us. Among the young ones, we had Simon Rattle, as well as the [older] ones I mentioned before, Tennstedt and Masur, and the period-instrument authority Christopher Hogwood.

MURAKAMI: I came back to Japan after my time in Boston, and when I heard the Saito Kinen Orchestra with you on the podium, it struck me how much more open and buoyant it sounded. I don’t know about its density, but my impression was that it was tremendously reminiscent of the old Boston Symphony sound.

What Is the New Beethoven

Performance Style?

MURAKAMI: I’d like to ask you one more thing about performing Beethoven. In the old days, there was a kind of standard style, as represented by somebody like Wilhelm Furtwängler. Karajan more or less carried on that approach. At some point, though, people got a little tired of that Beethoven image and started searching for a new one. Around 1960. Gould’s approach is one of those, I guess—keeping the framework intact but trying to move the music around freely within it. Kind of like dislodging various elements, pulling them apart and putting them back together again. There were several different movements like that, but no definable new format ever took shape—one that could stand up against the orthodox performance style. Am I making sense here?

OZAWA: Sure, sure.

MURAKAMI: It seems to me, though, that lately things have started to change. For one thing, the sound has tended, in fact, to grow thinner, hasn’t it?

OZAWA: Yes, you see less of the old tendency to do Beethoven the way you do Brahms—putting together a huge string section to make a thick, heavy sound. This probably has a lot to do with the rise of the period-instrument people.

MURAKAMI: I bet you’re right. They’re using fewer string players these days. And in concerto performances, too, the soloist doesn’t have to work so hard anymore to make a big sound. Even if they don’t go so far as to use a period fortepiano, the performer can play a modern piano to get a quieter, fortepiano sound. With the overall sound smaller and thinner, the performer can move more freely within a narrower dynamic range. That way, the Beethoven performance style has begun to move away from what it once was.

OZAWA: That’s definitely true in the case of the symphonies. Instead of using the orchestra as one big, powerful unit to make music, the style has changed so as to make each part, each component, more audible.

MURAKAMI: So you can hear the inner voices.

OZAWA: Right, right.

MURAKAMI: The Saito Kinen’s Beethoven performances feel very much like that.

OZAWA: Because Professor Saito was like that. So when I conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, I was often criticized for making the orchestra sound thin. Maestro Karajan used to tell me that, too, at first. He often made fun of me. The first time I conducted Mahler’s First, Maestro Karajan attended the concert. I was cueing everybody. You know, telling every musician where to come in—“You come in here … You come in here. ” Doing that makes you very busy.

MURAKAMI: Very busy, I would think!

OZAWA: So Maestro Karajan says to me, “Seiji, you don’t have to work so hard with my orchestra. Just do the overall conducting, and they’ll take care of the rest.” But, you know, by cueing them like that, I made the sound of the orchestra more open and transparent. The cues made each of the musicians come through more clearly. True, the overall conducting is very important, but it’s also important to bring out the details. The maestro admonished me the day after the concert, at breakfast. He was pretty angry. “Stop cueing the musicians,” he said. “That is not the job of the conductor.” I remember how scared I was conducting that night’s concert. I figured he wouldn’t come again, but I was shaking in my boots, wondering what I should do if he did. As it turned out, he never showed. [ Laughs. ]

MURAKAMI: In the old days, it was okay for the orchestra to have one, larger sound.

OZAWA: Right. The recordings were like that, too, of course. Maestro Karajan had a particular Berlin church he liked to record in. And when recording in Paris, he would always specify a hall where the sound echoed as in a church—places like the Salle Wagram, a big old dance hall.

MURAKAMI: A church and a dance hall! [ Laughs. ]

OZAWA: That was mainstream recording back then, to do it in a place with a good echo. The selling point of the space was, like, how many seconds a reverberation lasted. They tried to capture the sound as a single whole. In New York, too, they would do studio recordings in Manhattan Center, another hall with a good echo. Recordings of live performances were not that popular. Instead, everybody would choose a place with a big echo and do their recordings there.

MURAKAMI: Boston’s Symphony Hall has that kind of sound, too, doesn’t it?

OZAWA: That’s right. In the old days, they would take out half the seats to record, and have the orchestra perform where the seats would have been. To get a really nice echo. In my time, though, we tried to get a truer sound by playing in the normal position on stage.

MURAKAMI: So each voice could be heard.

OZAWA: Well, for that, too, but mainly so people could hear a performance that sounded as though an actual orchestra in performance was playing—without all the echo, keeping the reverberation as short as possible.

MURAKAMI: Now that you mention it, the Gould/Karajan performance we heard before had rich reverberations.

OZAWA: Maestro Karajan always gave the recording engineer detailed instructions regarding the way he wanted things to sound. Then he would adjust the phrasing to work within the framework of the sound. He knew just how to create the music so that the swelling of the phrase would come out between reverberations.

MURAKAMI: Like singing in the shower.

OZAWA: Sure, if you want to put it that way!

MURAKAMI: What kind of space does the Saito Kinen record in?

OZAWA: A very ordinary theater, the Matsumoto Bunka Kaikan in Nagano Prefecture. The sound there is hard, with very little reverberation.

MURAKAMI: So that’s why it’s possible to hear all the fine movements in the sound.

OZAWA: That’s it. But maybe it’s a little too clean. I’d like to have just a touch of an echo, but it’s hard to find the perfect hall. The best space in Japan now is that place in Tokyo … what is it? … Sumida Triphony Hall. That’s the best hall to record in in Tokyo.

MURAKAMI: Moving back to the subject of modern performances of Beethoven, does this involve reducing the number of stringed instruments—or if not actually reducing them, at least thinning down the sound?

OZAWA: Maybe it’s more a matter of splitting up the various sounds so you can hear everything from within the overall sound more clearly. That’s probably the dominant tendency these days, and it’s absolutely something that has come from period-instrument performances.