Seiji Ozawa Born 1935 Conductor Seiji Ozawa will be best remembered not just as the longest-serving music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he was in post for 29 years, but also as the first Japanese conductor to become widely known in the West. With his long, flowing hair, he always cut a distinctive dash on the podium, matched – in his early years, at least – by highly energetic performances of often large-scale, complex works. Born in Shenyang, China, Ozawa studied in Japan before heading to Europe where, in 1959, he made his breakthrough by winning the Besançon conducting competition. Spotted by Charles Munch, he went on to study with or work under several of the great conductors of the era, including Pierre Monteux, Herbert von Karajan and, as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic from 1961-65, Leonard Bernstein. Music directorships followed at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony and, in 1973, Boston SO. On leaving the latter post in 2002, Ozawa took his career in a new direction as music director of the Vienna State Opera, where he championed lesser known operas and also regularly conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. From 2010 onwards, illness restricted him to just a handful of appearances.
Chita Rivera Born 1933 Singer and actress Whether adding her wittily sarcastic rejoinders to ‘America’ or bitterly reproaching Maria in ‘A Boy Like That’, Chita Rivera took on the role of Anita in Bernstein’s West Side Story and made it her own. Many have played the part
