The conductor Seiji Ozawa sadly left us in February. As a tribute and also a Japanese reading exercise, I picked up this collection of conversations between the Maestro and the perpetual Nobel Prize candidate Haruki Murakami. Regular Murakami readers would know that he references a lot of jazz and classical music in his novels, which often adds an extra dimension to the mood he paints if one recognises the composers or artists, and he used to run a jazz bar. So this meeting between the two cultural icons should be very interesting, and it is, in fact, albeit for some very specific reasons. These six conversations took place just before and after the tragic earthquake in 2011, during a period of time when Ozawa was recovering from his treatments for oesophageal cancer and thus had some free time to reflect on his career. No one should expect a deep musical discourse in this book, but "casual" as it is supposed to be, it launches straight into some very obscure musical territories (such as a Honegger cantata) early on and Murakami brings up some oddly specific recordings to go through with Ozawa which makes it very difficult to read on paper. Despite having set topics, they often go off a tangent so the bulk of the conversations appear directionless. I would imagine this book is very difficult to follow if you do not have a good exposure to classical music already. However, since Ozawa was the only person to have studied with both Karajan and Bernstein, on top of Münch and Monteux, he has a lot of fascinating stories to tell, and he does so with a colourful personality. These conversations are full of anecdotes, insider stories and big name-droppings that would delight the classical music aficionados, such as Glenn Gould's peculiarities that Murakami needs to censor ("残念ながら活字にはできないエピソードがいくつか披露された") [1], Peter Serkin being a rebellious child [2], flat hunting in Boston with Zimerman [3], his difficulty in understanding Berg's "Wozzeck" [4], Stravinsky editing the rhythms of "The Rite of Spring" whilst the NYPO was rehearsing the old version and thus angering everybody [5], him "stealing" batons from Ormandy's office [6], him breaking a finger conducting "Das Lied von der Erde" [7], him storming out of a rehearsal of Ginastera's "Estancia" over some unruly BPO players [8], and his mother mistaking the La Scala boos as "Bravos" after his "Tosca" and Pavarotti had to comfort him [9]. This 2014 reprint also includes an additional essay about Murakami meeting Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ozawa insisting on a jazz pianist to get out of retirement and play "Rhapsody in Blue" with the Saito Kinen Orchestra. If you are a long time classical music fan, this is a highly entertaining page-turner, not least because it gives us another opportunity to revisit the golden age of pre-globalisation music-making that, for better or worse, will never return. For all the cultural clashes mentioned, it makes one realise how many barriers Ozawa had to overcome and what achievements he had. This was published 13 years before he died and already you can tell it's a life well lived. Rest well, Maestro, we can now hear your Beethoven beyond earth.
1 p. 51
2 p. 99
3. p. 101
4. pp. 170 - 171
5. pp. 185 - 192
6. pp. 214 - 216
7. pp. 316 - 317
8. pp. 345 - 348
9. pp. 359 - 360
