IT might seem to have been a simple matter for Carnegie Hall, which mounted a citywide festival centering on Chinese music and musicians last season, Ancient Paths, Modern Voices, to shift its focus to a neighboring great nation for its current festival, JapanNYC. You basically use the same template, plug in different composers and performers, and let things play themselves out, right?
Wrong.
For one thing, the differences between the musical cultures of China and Japan, especially as they relate to Western cultures, run deep. The Chinese explosion of interest in Western classical music in recent decades — though not without significant earlier roots, mostly trampled by the Cultural Revolution — is a happening of the moment, perhaps best personified by the brash young pianist Lang Lang, who was an adviser to Carnegie for the Chinese festival.
Photo: The conductor Seiji Ozawa, a player in JapanNYC, a festival Carnegie Hall is mounting this season
In Japan, despite the disruption of World War II, the assimilation of Western classical music is a much more settled phenomenon, institutionalized in the second half of the 19th century and now well exemplified by the veteran conductor Seiji Ozawa, who is the artistic director of JapanNYC.
And here things have become doubly difficult for Carnegie. For even before the festival was announced in January, Mr. Ozawa, now 75, fell into a series of major health problems that have forced him to cancel almost all of his activities this year. Those lingering problems — at the moment centered in his lower back — have left a cloud of uncertainty hanging over his participation in the festival just days before his first scheduled appearance.
“We simply hope for the best,” the pianist Mitsuko Uchida and a fellow participant in the festival, who had just seen Mr. Ozawa in Japan, said recently from London. “He’s had back problems all his life, and we won’t know until rehearsals start to what extent he will be able to work seated, and how his stamina will be.”
Clive Gillinson, the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, put on a braver face the other day, sounding certain that Mr. Ozawa would be able to conduct. But at the same time he revealed that Mr. Ozawa’s role would be reduced.
“Seiji and I talked the issue through,” he said. “The problem hasn’t gone away yet, but we think we found a way that he can work through it, if he’ll just hold himself back and stay sitting.”
That’s a big if, with the irrepressible Mr. Ozawa.
Compele on >> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/arts/music/12festival.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
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