The Japanese conductor
Seiji Ozawa
, who
directed the most prestigious orchestras in the world
and symbolized throughout a long international career the
union between the music of the East and the West
, died at his home in Tokyo
at the age of 88
.
According to public broadcaster NHK and other Japanese media, Ozawa died on February 6 due to heart failure but it was revealed this Friday.
The funeral was held privately
, and was attended only by close relatives, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper added.
Ozawa was born in 1935 in the Chinese province of Manchuria, which was then a Japanese colony, and began studying
piano in primary school
.
But after
breaking two fingers playing rugby
- another of his passions - when he was a teenager, he ended up turning to conducting.
In 1959 he moved abroad and met some of the biggest stars in the classical music world, including composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, for whom he was
assistant at the New York Philharmonic
during the 1961-1962 season.
The great conductor Herbert von Karajan also hired him as an assistant
the following year at the Berlin Philharmonic
.
Ozawa conducted
orchestras in Chicago and San Francisco
, in the United States, and
Toronto
, in Canada.
He also worked for
29 years
as music director of the
Boston Symphony
Orchestra , where an auditorium is named after him.
In 2002 he became chief conductor of the
Vienna
State Opera , in Austria, until 2010.
The end of his career was marked by illness, including
cancer detected in 2010
.
At that time, together with his writer friend Haruki Murakami, they decided to record the conversations they had about their musical tastes and the product of those conversations became the book "Music, only music."
"People think I'm not far from death, but I'm going to
try with all my might to avoid dying
," he joked in 2014, in one of his last appearances before the press.
News in development.
D.S.