Japanese Seiji Ozawa

Seiji Ozawa

Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa took up his seat as a foreign member of France’s revered academy of fine arts Wednesday, joining the likes of US filmmaker Woody Allen and British architect Norman Foster. The 73-year-old was elected in 2001 as one of 16 associate foreign members of the academy, but it took seven years for him to fit the Paris ceremony into his hectic international schedule.

Wearing the academy’s traditional embroidered black-and-green top coat, designed by fellow member Pierre Cardin, Ozawa was formally welcomed by French Culture Minister Christine Albanel into the 200-year-old institution.

Founded in 1816, the revered body honours 57 artists from the fields of painting and sculpture to film, photography and music, in addition to its foreign members.

Addressing the Japanese maestro, the opera director Hugues Gall recalled that Ozawa won a young conductor’s contest in the eastern French city of Besancon in 1959, marking the start of his “relationship with France”.

“This relationship has been going on for close to 50 years, and you constantly renewed it with your concert programmes by showing France a loyalty, an attention and — why not say it — a very special kind of love,” Gall said.