Seiji Ozawa (77), conductor and music advisor to the Mito Chamber Orchestra, will assume the position of new director of Art Tower Mito (Mito City, Ibaraki Prefecture) effective April 1st.
Art Tower Mito has been without a director since the passing of its first director, Hidekazu Yoshida, in May 2012. With the appointment of Ozawa, a world-renowned conductor who has served as music advisor to the Mito Chamber Orchestra since its opening, as director, the museum aims to further promote arts and culture "from Mito to the world."
Ozawa was born in Xiangyan (formerly Fengtian), China, in 1935. In the fall of 1959, he won first prize at the International Competition for Orchestra Conductors held in Besançon, France. The following summer, Charles Munch, then music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a judge for the competition, invited him to Tanglewood, where he won the Berkshire Music Center's highest award, the Koussevitzky Prize for outstanding student conductor.
He then studied under Herbert von Karajan in West Berlin. He caught the eye of Leonard Bernstein and served as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic for two years from 1961. After serving as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Ravinia Festival and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, he became the 13th music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1973, a remarkable 29 years in the position, raising the orchestra's reputation not only in the United States but internationally as well, establishing it as one of the world's finest orchestras.
At the 2002 New Year's Concert, he became the first Japanese to conduct at the Vienna State Opera, and the performance was broadcast to 65 countries around the world, receiving widespread acclaim. He served as the opera house's music director from the fall of that year until 2009. In Japan, he and Kazuyoshi Akiyama founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra, based on the 1984 Saito Hideo Memorial Concert in memory of their mentor, Hideo Saito. The orchestra officially began operations in 1987. In 1992, they expanded the orchestra into the international music festival, the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto, which has garnered significant attention every year since. Currently, Ozawa is on a hiatus due to medical treatment, but on March 30th, he took the podium for the first time in a long while at the Seiji Ozawa Music Academy, which nurtures young musicians, and conducted Beethoven's "Egmont Overture" for approximately 10 minutes. It has been announced that he will conduct Ravel's "Little Child and the Magic" at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture in August (a total of four performances).