Харуки Мураками - Absolutely on Music

Follow-Up Interview:

Maurice Peress and Harold Gomberg

MURAKAMI: The other day we talked a little about Maurice Peress, one of the other assistant conductors with you under Leonard Bernstein.

OZAWA: Oh, yes, yes, it just so happens I heard from him a short time after our conversation. He sent an old photo to my New York manager’s office. It was a shot of the three of us assistant conductors standing in front of Carnegie Hall. It came with a nice note from him inquiring after my health. He heard about the concert I had to cancel in New York and decided to write. It was forwarded to me just yesterday or the day before. A total coincidence.

MURAKAMI: That’s nice. I did a little research about Maurice Peress on the Internet after we talked about him. He’s Puerto Rican– American and is apparently still quite active. He conducted the Kansas City Philharmonic from 1974 to 1980 and afterward conducted orchestras all over the world. His son is a pretty famous jazz drummer, Paul Peress. He’s into fusion.

Ozawa reads the printout that I show him.

OZAWA: Maurice did a lot of conducting in China, too—and the Shanghai Opera!

MURAKAMI: He also wrote a book, Dvořák to Duke Ellington.

OZAWA: Yes, he was a good friend of Duke Ellington’s. Wow, it’s amazing that you can look up stuff like this.

MURAKAMI: It’s on Wikipedia, but I don’t know how accurate it is. I looked up Harold Gomberg, too. His younger brother is also an oboist. He was the principal oboist for the Boston Symphony.

OZAWA: Right, right. Ralph was the younger brother, played first chair in Boston for a long time. He retired not long before I left. The elder brother was first chair in New York, the younger the first chair in Boston.

MURAKAMI: It’s rare for siblings to play the same instrument and for both of them to be so successful at it.

OZAWA: Yes, very rare. And they were both terrific. Ralph’s wife was head of the Boston Ballet School. Harold was a lot crazier than Ralph. He had this incredibly beautiful daughter he was scheming to get hooked up with Claudio Abbado.

MURAKAMI: Abbado came after you as an assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, didn’t he?

OZAWA: Yes, he was still a bachelor then. I got swept up in all that. It was pretty wild. [ Laughter. ]

MURAKAMI: I understand Harold Gomberg enjoyed a performance of yours when you were a young assistant and chose you to conduct one of his recordings.

OZAWA: Yes, he heard me conduct Toshiro Mayuzumi’s Bacchanale and part of Firebird as an encore in place of Lenny, and he got me to conduct his recording.

MURAKAMI: He was first chair in the New York Philharmonic for a very long time, wasn’t he? Thirty-four years altogether.

OZAWA: Right, but still, he passed away quite some time ago. Ralph, too, in 2006. Harold’s wife, Margret, was a harpist, and she also did some composing. She was quite famous. They loved Italy and had a wonderful old country place in Capri, where they spent their summers. They invited me there once. I was in Europe conducting some French orchestra and had a lot of time on my hands, so they had me visit. I took the train to Naples and the ferry to Capri. They used to paint together. [ He reads from the Wikipedia printout. ] Ah, it’s all coming back to me now.

MURAKAMI: It says he died of a heart attack on Capri.

OZAWA: Oh, really? He was twenty years older than me.

Interlude 3

Eugene Ormandy’s Baton

OZAWA: Eugene Ormandy was a tremendously kind man. He took a liking to me and invited me many times to guest-conduct his Philadelphia Orchestra. This was a real help to me. I had a very low salary at Toronto, but the Philadelphia Orchestra had lots of money and paid well. He trusted me and let me use his personal office in the performance hall whenever I was conducting there.

He once gave me a baton of his, and it was terrific, a special-order item, very easy to use. I had so little money in those days, I couldn’t afford a custom-made baton. So anyway, one day I opened his desk drawer and found a whole row of them. I figured he wouldn’t miss a few batons if they were gone for a while and helped myself to three. But I got caught right away. [ Laughter. ] He had this scary woman for a personal secretary. She probably made a habit of counting the batons in his drawer and she grilled me. “You took them, didn’t you?” “Yes, I’m sorry, I took them.”

MURAKAMI: How many batons were there in the drawer?

OZAWA: I don’t know, maybe ten.

MURAKAMI: Well of course they caught you if you took three out of ten! [ Laughter. ] But you mean to say his batons were so easy to use they were worth stealing?

OZAWA: Yes, they were great batons. This kind of baton was like the tip of a fishing rod cut off with a piece of cork attached for a handle, very flexible, made to his specifications. Later, he told me where I could order them.

MURAKAMI: I’ll bet he got a big laugh telling everybody about this. “Once upon a time, Seiji Ozawa stole three batons from my desk drawer!” [ Laughter. ]

Fourth Conversation

On the Music of Gustav Mahler

THIS CONVERSATION TOOK place on February 22, 2011, in my Tokyo office. There was also a short follow-up interview, after which I added a few details. We talked a great deal about Mahler. As we spoke, I realized what an important part of Ozawa’s repertory the music of Mahler has been. I myself had a problem getting into Mahler for a very long time, but at a certain stage in my life the music began to move me. Still, I was astounded to hear from Ozawa that a Mahler composition he had never heard before could make a deep impact on him when he read the score. Was such a thing really possible?

Saito Kinen as Pioneer

MURAKAMI: I’ve been meaning to ask you something but it slipped my mind last time. The Saito Kinen Orchestra is not a permanent organization—it meets just once a year, with a somewhat different roster each time—but still it seems to have a consistency to its sound, wouldn’t you say?

OZAWA: Yes, I would. And I think that as long as I’m conducting it, that consistency will be there. Also, it’s an orchestra that strongly foregrounds the strings. And we choose pieces to play that work well with that sound. Among Mahler pieces, say, the First and the Ninth … and the Second is like that, too.

MURAKAMI: Can the sound itself of the orchestra as a whole remain unchanged even though you don’t play together regularly?

OZAWA: Well, if anything has changed, maybe it’s the oboe. After playing with us for many years, Fumiaki Miyamoto retired a few years ago. He coached his successor for a while, but after he left, we weren’t able to settle on a permanent oboist. Then we found a very good French player and recently performed the Berlioz Fantastique, so we’re getting closer to our original sound.

MURAKAMI: Does the sound of the orchestra change noticeably when someone other than you conducts?

OZAWA: I guess so. That’s what they tell me. That it changes a lot. But the strings are firmly established as the tradition of the Saito Kinen. That foundation was built by Professor Saito’s former students. There are a few other orchestras in the world that were formed the same way as the Saito Kinen, but that string foundation is what distinguishes the Saito. The string section is an absolutely disciplined unit.

MURAKAMI: The Saito Kinen was the first of these seasonal orchestras, wasn’t it?

OZAWA: I think you may be right. I don’t think there were any other orchestras like it anywhere in the world at the time. The Mahler Chamber, the Lucerne, the Deutsche Kammer: they were all formed after the Saito Kinen. But you know, back when we got the orchestra started, there was a lot of negative criticism, people saying there was no way that such a thrown-together group could make good music. There was a lot of positive feedback, too, of course.