Ozawa

[Dave2002]

His early recording of Turangalila with the Toronto Symphony is well thought of though, isn't it? I used to have it on LP; I don't think that the Takemitsu coupling (fourth side) has made it to CD yet.

I got to know Turangalila through that recording, which a friend bought and played over and over. I always thought that some of that was rather scrappy, but it was the only one available at the time IIRC. Perhaps at least he was brave and adventurous in those days. I have picked up a few - very few (e.g in charity shops, or remainder bins) - of his CDs since, which are decent enough.

[pastoralguy]

I have picked up a few - very few (e.g in charity shops, or remainder bins) - of his CDs since, which are decent enough.

Yes, most of my Ozawa has come from the same sources. 'Decent' sums up his recordings nicely.

[Conchis]

He recorded a Prokofiev cycle for DG in the late 80s/early 90s which was hugely controversial (the recipient of a single star from the Penguin Record Guide). Never heard it, so no idea as to its quality.

[umslopogaas]

#16 Dave, I also bought those RCA LPs of the Turangalila symphony, and I'm not musical enough to know if they are scrappy, but I thought they were fantastic and they were the best introduction to Messiaen's music I can imagine. I still have them and " Joie du sang des etoiles" can still blow my socks off.

[Dave2002]

msg 19: Maybe scrappy works sometimes, though obviously the reviewer in today's BaL didn't think the performance by Klemperer with some pretty scrappy playing of the Janacek Sinfonietta was an effect worth keeping, nor the dodgy bits in the Rattle recording. Yes - I did think the Ozawa LP was fantastic - because there wasn't anything else to compare it with. Later on I tended to favour Previn with the LSO.

Sometimes scrappiness might help a performance, but probably usually it doesn't. Bruno Walter's CSO recording of Brahms 4th symphony has some scratchy playing in the Scherzo - though I can forgive him for that. Very few orchestras could actually play that well - though technical standards have risen so now it's probably a given. Jochum's live performances of Brahms 1 in the 1970s had some really wild brass playing - and the effect was fantastic. Playing safe and getting the notes right isn't always a good option either.

[Roslynmuse]

I saw Ozawa a couple of times with the Boston SO in London in the 1980s (LvB 6 & Stravinsky Rite, Mahler 2) and 'solid rather than inspired' seems a perfectly fair summing up to me. I've got very little, next to nothing in fact, of his recordings but I do remember a Ravel Daphnis and Chloe I bought on LP in 1975 and which I thought was very good. Never got it on CD, though, if it's ever appeared on there.

If the Mahler 2 was the 1984 Prom performance with Jessye Norman, then I was there (2nd row of the Arena!) and, despite having a teenage enthusiasm for the work, I was disappointed by Ozawa's reading. I'd heard several of his broadcasts (R3 broadcast a lot from Boston in the early 80s) and recordings but after being initially impressed by his work, I became more and more of the opinion that it was quite ordinary, or became so. He disappeared from my radar quite a while ago, maybe even before he became ill.

[Richard Barrett]

I recently read the newish book of interviews between Ozawa and Haruki Murakami, in which it seemed to me that the latter had much more interesting and valuable things to say about music. This may be because Ozawa was unwell during the period in which these dialogues took place, or it may be because he just isn't much of a talker. I loved his Turangalîla back in the day, and his Takemitsu recordings and Daphnis et Chloé and some of his Prokofiev symphonies, no.1 for example. Other than the aforementioned I've never taken much notice of him, and the interviews had the effect of dimming what enthusiasm I had.

[Petrushka]

If the Mahler 2 was the 1984 Prom performance with Jessye Norman, then I was there (2nd row of the Arena!) and, despite having a teenage enthusiasm for the work, I was disappointed by Ozawa's reading. I'd heard several of his broadcasts (R3 broadcast a lot from Boston in the early 80s) and recordings but after being initially impressed by his work, I became more and more of the opinion that it was quite ordinary, or became so. He disappeared from my radar quite a while ago, maybe even before he became ill.

Yes it was indeed that 1984 Prom. I seem to remember newspaper reviews at the time saying how old the orchestra looked and that was certainly true. I've never bought any of Ozawa's Mahler cycle despite my mania for collecting recordings of those I've seen perform them.

[jayne lee wilson]

The very first LP of 20thC music I ever bought was Ozawa's CSO coupling of the Lutosławski Concerto for Orchestra with the Janacek Sinfonietta, and very splendid it seemed at the time, though accompanied by quite a shock when I heard the theme from Crown Court coming back at me - I'd had no idea!

Early 90s, I taped his Brahms 1st with the Saito Kinen Orchestra live at the Proms, one which really raised the radio-roof - recall Donald Macleod saying in the back-announcement that "that's a sound you'll remember for a very long time..." Which it was!
I taped a Brahms 4th from them on R3 around the same time, another swift and very passionate performance, as if carved from the air. Impressive! But I didn't yet have a CD player so couldn't follow up with exploring the partnership on disc. It seemed a genuinely close one, and may be a more fruitful path than his variable catalogues with Boston, Chicago or Berlin... who knows.