A Classic Convergence

Seiji Ozawa has been music director of the venerable Boston Symphony Orchestra for a record 28 years. After next season he moves on to head the Vienna State Opera. He was once short-listed for the post of music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. He is, in other words, one of the half-dozen most prominent conductors on the scene today. And yet it is a Japanese orchestra composed of players who assemble for an annual 10-day festival in Nagano and occasionally tour that seems to inspire Ozawa the most.

Sixteen years ago, Ozawa formed the Saito Kinen Orchestra--which performed for only the second time in the U.S. at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Monday night--to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Hideo Saito, the founder of the leading music conservatory in Tokyo. Saito’s devoted students populate orchestras around the world, and these are the players who give up their summer vacations to return to Japan and participate in the Saito Kinen Festival of concerts and opera productions. It was at this festival that Julie Taymor made her debut directing opera in a production of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex,” starring Jessye Norman, that has become legend.

Something seems to happen to Ozawa when he conducts the Saito Kinen. Is it the mountain air in Nagano or is it that the musicians are collectively recapturing their youth? Maybe it has do with the fact that Ozawa, who has never mastered English, can rehearse in his native language. But for whatever reason, he brings the vitality and technical brilliance to Saito Kinen that he is often accused of sapping from the Boston Symphony. One need only compare Ozawa’s vivid new live recording of Mahler’s Second Symphony made with his Japanese band to the dispirited Mahler recordings he made in Boston a few years ago.

That vitality was just as apparent Monday for Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the only work that the orchestra has brought along on this American tour, which continues in San Francisco, Chicago and New York. It is a vitality that could seem misplaced if you accept the notion that the Ninth Symphony, the last one Mahler completed, is music’s most moving farewell. But Mahler’s symphony is no one thing. While its outer movements are unspeakably poignant, its inner two movements are dance music gone wild, signifying life lived to the mad hilt.

Indeed, throughout the symphony, anguish and acceptance constantly alternate. When Leonard Bernstein conducted the symphony, which was written in 1909, it felt as though Mahler had revealed the essence of dying. But when Pierre Boulez conducts it, exquisite suffering and nostalgia give way to its modern harmonies and textures, as if the Ninth were the first great symphony of the 20th century.

But whatever the Ninth might represent didn’t seem to concern Ozawa very much. He led an impressively played performance that treated Mahler’s symphony as pure, abstract music. An impression of tidiness was strong, because the playing itself was so tidy. The Saito Kinen cannot possibly have the kind of opulent ensemble that comes when orchestra members work together year-round. But the players are extremely strong, and they seem stimulated by the freshness of their surroundings. That they all have similar training produces a remarkable unity of tone. The unwavering intonation in every section is a special pleasure.

An illustration of the unique intensity of inhabiting Mahler’s sound world, rather than in his emotional world, came at the end of the symphony. In the last movement, one of the most heartbreaking melodies in all of music disintegrates into thin, small fragments. Very near the end, for a long moment, all that survives is the note A, held by the first violins in soft, slender tone, as if the life force itself survives by this delicate threat.

The Saito Kinen violins held this A with wondrous perfection, when suddenly someone’s hearing aid went haywire, its electronic whine joining the violins and giving the illusion of bending the pitch. In almost any other performance, the spell would have been broken. This time, however, the impression was of the violins--of Mahler, himself--holding firm for the few more moments left of life. And whether that was due to a lack of emotion in the playing or a kind of Zen-like concentration that makes emotion irrelevant is the kind of question that made this a fascinating performance to think about.

But there was also the interesting option of not thinking at all, especially during the middle movements, in which Ozawa demonstrated the orchestra’s instrumental virtuosity and splendid teamwork. It was as if he were the exciting young conductor he once was, but with the benefit of all his years of experience. For a while, at least, profundity wasn’t the point of arguably the most profound symphony in the repertory.