Passing the Batons

Amid a sea of musicians all in white, Seiji Ozawa said goodbye to the Boston Symphony at the Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires on a warm afternoon last Sunday. Thursday night, it was Kurt Masur’s turn to part with his New York Philharmonic audience, at a 75th birthday gala sponsored by the Lincoln Center Festival and given in a colorfully decorated Avery Fisher Hall. With these two prominent conductors stepping down from the helms of America’s oldest orchestras the same week (Masur’s last concerts as music director of the New York Philharmonic are tonight and Sunday at Tanglewood), an era ends.

For Ozawa’s sentimental final performance, he asked the audience to sing along with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia,” which students who attend the Tanglewood Music Center training program traditionally sing at its opening exercises (as a young Ozawa did when he first arrived to study there in 1960). Masur’s moving final encore was Bach’s Air on the G String. During it, he dramatically walked off stage as the New York strings continued to play with exquisite beauty.

Surrounded by the sympathetic, cheering music lovers who showed up in large numbers for these events, even a cynic could momentarily forget that the long tenures of both music directors have been controversial. The New York Philharmonic forced Masur out sooner than he would have liked, as he has complained to the media. For years, the Boston Symphony fended off calls from critics (and, I’m told, from orchestra players as well) to remove Ozawa.

The situations in Boston and New York seem to have little in common, the conductors and their circumstances hardly comparable. The facile, poetic Ozawa, who remained in Boston an epic 29 years, has the reputation for being a lightweight, if likable, musician who did not do enough to maintain the orchestra’s high standards.

But he’s always been popular with the public. The attendance figures for “Celebrating Seiji”--the Tanglewood weekend, which included Ozawa conducting the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra (a student ensemble), a Saturday night celebrity gala (with John Williams, Mstislav Rostropovich, Gil Shaham, Jessye Norman, Marcus Roberts and Steven Spielberg) and the Sunday BSO program--had attendance figures of more than 41,000, and it raised about $350,000.

The serious, earnest Masur served in New York an impressive 12 seasons (only Zubin Mehta lasted longer as music director of a famously difficult orchestra). Unlike Ozawa, Masur brought a stern military discipline to players known for their pugnacity. A devoted classicist, Masur gradually won begrudging admiration in this ruthless city. And his image was burnished after Sept. 11, especially when he performed what was by all accounts a profoundly intent performance of Brahms’ “German Requiem” in the wake of the tragedy.

Neither Ozawa nor Masur lacks vitality or vision. Both have dutifully promoted new music, and American music, up to a point. Both are highly energetic. Yet neither brought the imagination or inspiration of a contemporary sensibility to their orchestras, which are increasingly perceived as culturally irrelevant. When people talk about the dispirited state of classical music these days, they need only point to these two famed, distinguished East Coast orchestras as a prime examples. (Typically, the blinkered Eastern music establishment and media still show only a begrudging awareness that orchestral leadership has moved to the West Coast.)

Sad to say, the Ozawa and Masur farewell concerts weren’t very exciting or very interesting. In Tanglewood, Ozawa led an indifferently played performance of “Symphonie Fantastique” that lacked the attention to detail, textural transparency or careful instrumental balances necessary to reveal the visionary quality of Berlioz’s orchestral writing. Its high point was a mildly climactic bacchanalian frenzy at the end. For the second half of the program Ozawa conducted a satisfyingly straightforward account of Beethoven’s 20-minute Choral Fantasy; its finest moments were Peter Serkin’s transfixingly eloquent piano solos.

Masur’s birthday bash, which was televised and good-naturedly hosted by Beverly Sills, was a glorified pops program consisting mainly of single movements from full works. This was highly unusual for so high-minded a music director. But Masur, who was known to court favor with the musicians in battles against management, used Thursday’s concert as an opportunity to pay tribute to the undeniable brilliance of the individual players in his orchestra, by featuring them in movements from such works as Brahms’ Double Concerto, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The ensemble playing from his musical muscle car was equally spectacular but mercilessly hard driven. The one recent work, a Fandango that featured solo trumpet and trombone by New Jersey composer Joseph Turrin was trivial. Ravel’s “Bolero,” which closed the formal part of the program, sounded altogether militaristic (hearing the machine-gun-precise drumming, my instinct was to duck).

Curiously, Ozawa and Masur each programmed Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” Overture as openers, but neither conducted it. Ozawa turned it over to his assistant conductor, Federico Cortese, to begin his Friday program. The New York Philharmonic performed it without a conductor, which has become a tradition since Bernstein’s death a dozen years ago.

And nothing could better indicate just how strongly Bernstein’s legacy haunts the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, the two orchestras with which he had the closest relationship. Both bands now look to Americans to attract new audiences and make their institutions matter more in culturally changing times.

Lorin Maazel, who takes over the New York Philharmonic in September, was hastily hired. He is a brilliant technician, an eccentric interpreter and a conductor with a history of making enemies.

James Levine, on the other hand, didn’t exactly leap at the Boston Symphony offer--his hiring was a long, drawn-out affair. He is a magnificent and versatile musician, but there remain unanswered questions about his health (he has looked as if he conducts in pain lately) and about how deep his commitment will be to Boston and Tanglewood. He doesn’t begin for two long years.

No wonder, then, that the farewells to Ozawa and Masur were so fondly nostalgic. The future is anything but certain.