In Concert: Onstage and Offstage With the Boston Symphony Orchestra

To Seiji Ozawa, the Boston Symphony Orchestra season is filled with challenges. The audience at the opening night concert is greeted by leaflets declaring the musicians' grievances: A strike may cut off the season. Ozawa has chosen to make it a full orchestra, huge chorus, and outstanding vocal soloists: The local critics are eager to judge the results. And the season includes a performance at the reopening of Carnegie Hall, a major recording, and even a concert version of an opera.There is, as always, the tension between players and conductor. But for one of the musicians, the principal trumpet player, the season is both a challenge and a question of his professional survival, because of his conflict with his conductor. He feels forced to prove himself each time he plays. Yet his performances influence the way the whole orchestra sounds. The interplay between these two men becomes the dramatic center of an intensely moving story.The concertmaster, the choral director, the official coterie around Ozawa, the major players in the orchestra, are all part of a fascinating view of the BSO no outsider can witness. From rehearsal to performance, from back-corridor talk to at-home life, from Boston to New York to Tanglewood, here is an intimate, behind-the-scenes picture of one of the foremost orchestras in the world.