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Seiji Ozawa will celebrate his 80th<\/sup> birthday in September. In recent years he has suffered a variety of illnesses and now makes only occasional appearances as a conductor. He is fondly remembered in Toronto, where he was music director of the Toronto Symphony between 1965 and 1969. In fact, one of the pieces he chose to audition for that post was Berlioz\u2019 Symphonie Fantastique<\/em>. Although not yet 30 at the time, he bowled over the TSO players and audiences too with a performance that was elegant, poetic and exciting. Eight years later, he did the same thing in Boston \u2013 with the same piece \u2013 and landed the music directorship of the Boston Symphony, a post he was to hold for an unprecedented 29 years.<\/p>\n This recording was made soon after he took over the Boston Symphony, and at the time it was very well-received. It was one of the first recordings Deutsche Grammophon made with Ozawa in Boston, and there were many more to come. I had the pleasure of attending some of the Ozawa\/BSO recording sessions in Symphony Hall, Boston \u2013 music by Ravel was on tap that week – and I can testify to the spectacular results DG was getting. The producer for most of those recordings was Thomas Mowrey and he made the most of the high quality resources he was given. Symphony Hall, one of the world\u2019s greatest concert halls, is also an outstanding recording venue. In 1959, Leonard Bernstein made his famous recording of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic in Symphony Hall.<\/p>\n Mowrey also had the Boston Symphony in top form with such luminaries as trumpeter Armando Ghitalla, flutist Doriot Anthony-Dwyer, and oboist Ralph Gomberg in principle chairs. In Seiji Ozawa, he had one of the most gifted and charismatic conductors of his generation. At the time, DG was the most prestigious classical label in the world and had superb international distribution. For most of its history, DG had been primarily European in its choice of artists, but in the 1970s it began to record in the United States, primarily with the Boston and Chicago orchestras.<\/p>\n Apparently, DG has decided not to re-release its older recordings made in the U.S. and has licensed this part of its catalogue to Pentatone. In the liner notes Pentatone claims that \u201cwith the advent of the multi-channel Super Audio CD, there is finally a system that makes it possible to release these magnificent recordings in the quality they deserved back then.\u201d Pentatone says that it has re-mastered DG\u2019s original multichannel tapes, \u201cmost of which had not left their boxes for 30 years.\u201d One would think that a Super Audio CD player was needed to get the most out of this CD, but Pentatone assures us that \u201ca regular CD player though only in stereo\u201d will work pretty well too. Like most listeners, I don\u2019t have a Super Audio CD player but on my machine this Symphonie Fantastique<\/em> did sound very good indeed. The dynamic range is huge, the timbres of individual instruments and sections are true, and the sound has a great presence. Coming soon are more Ozawa\/BSO performances including Berlioz\u2019 La Damnation de Faust<\/em> and Bernstein\u2019s Met performance of Bizet\u2019s Carmen.<\/em> For more on this re-mastering project, visit Pentatone\u2019s website at www.pentatonemusic.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Review: Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique Op. 14. Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":27235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[118,77,51,52,60,4933],"tags":[5382,5381],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/04\/71nvwKRI2OL._SL1400_.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-75d","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27231"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27231"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27239,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27231\/revisions\/27239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27231"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=27231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"conductor](\"http:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/04\/Seiji-Ozawa.jpg\")