Photos, Felix Broede: Okisawa; Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: Midori
Saturday, November 8, 2025
Boston Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA
“… Nodoka Okisawa, a protégée of former BSO Music Director Seiji Ozawa, makes her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut [this week] with Takemitsu’s “Requiem for strings,” as well as Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony and Violin Concerto with soloist Midori.” (CRB)
Maybe Dvořák isn’t the first composer one associates with Seiji Ozawa, although he recorded Symphonies Eight & Nine with the Vienna Philharmonic for Philips and a previous Ninth for that label in San Francisco, and with the Vienna Philharmonic in London he led a spacious and unusually dark reading of the Seventh.
Tōru Takemitsu’s music, yes, a regular in Ozawa’s repertoire. The Requiem (1957), with the Boston strings in fine form, sympathetic to the score’s bittersweet, fragile, and agitated nature.
Dvořák’s Violin Concerto found Midori and Nodoka Okisawa investing much conviction and personality into it, not least lyrical beauty and powerful emotions, brought out through considered tempos which laid bare the music, such inspection, negating glibness and showiness (Midori’s virtuosity self-evidently focussed on a musical cause), was in many ways a revelation, whether the first movement being enquired of, the soulful eloquence of the slow movement, or the dancing vitality of the Finale, soloist and conductor in league to search the piece, successfully achieved, the BSO in close connection. Much cheering cued an encore, from Bach’s E-major Partita (BWV1006), a lightly bowed, airborne, and quicksilver ‘Preludio’.
Following the interval, one of the great Symphonies, Dvořák Seven, Okisawa (who spoke movingly about Ozawa the man and how he encouraged her) led the Seventh with muscular contours, rich colours, and rhythmic verve, with an especially expressive Adagio, beguiling woodwinds gracing the music, then a slightly subdued Scherzo, and a Finale that further illustrated Okisawa’s penchant for emphatic accents, and sectionalising. The Symphony’s very end speeded then slowed, unconvincingly, if pretty good up to then.
‘From the New World’. Not the Philips recording (that’s dated May 1991, Vienna).
Seiji street sign…