Kent Nagano

It is surprising to learn that Kent Nagano once seemed destined for a legal career, given the depth of his influence on modern orchestral and operatic performance. Renowned for championing twentieth- and twenty-first-century repertoire, he forged extended ties with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Opéra National de Lyon, and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal while building an extensive catalog of acclaimed recordings.

Born in Berkeley, California, on November 22, 1951, Nagano began serious musical study at age six yet pursued simultaneous degrees in sociology and music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, completing them in 1974. He then enrolled at San Francisco State University in 1976 to study law. Composition classes with Grosvenor Cooper and Roger Nixon redirected his focus toward music, while an encounter with Laszlo Varga—former principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic under Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Leonard Bernstein—steered him toward conducting. Although he later abandoned composition, Nagano has observed, “While I seemed to be quite able from the point of view of craftsmanship, I was not very good at the creative aspects! However, having the skills of composition only increases the admiration that one can have for the exceptionally talented who have composed great works.” From 1977 to 1979 he apprenticed under Sarah Caldwell at the Opera Company of Boston, ultimately serving as assistant conductor.

In 1978 Nagano was appointed music director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, remaining in that role until 2009. With the ensemble he conducted the first American staging of Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina in 1982. The following year he joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra as assistant conductor and, in 1984, substituted without rehearsal for a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. Olivier Messiaen subsequently invited him to help Seiji Ozawa prepare the world premiere of the expansive opera Saint François d’Assise in 1984, a work Nagano later recorded. His decade as music director of the Opéra National de Lyon (1988–1998) featured notable premieres, among them Peter Eötvös’s Three Sisters, which he commissioned, along with recordings of Debussy’s unfinished Rodrigue et Chimène, John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, Busoni’s paired one-act operas Arlecchino and Turandot, and the incomplete Doktor Faust in alternate realizations by Philipp Jarnach and Antony Beaumont. While leading the Hallé Orchestra from 1991 to 2000 he also documented Adams’s El Niño and the four-act version of Britten’s Billy Budd.

Nagano became principal conductor and music director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin in 2000. The next year he assumed the principal conductorship of the Los Angeles Opera, becoming its inaugural music director in 2003. In 2006 he relinquished both posts to take the music directorship of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the Bavarian State Opera. The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin subsequently named him Honorary Conductor. He concluded his tenure at the Bavarian State Opera in 2013 and, in 2015, accepted the positions of general music director and chief conductor at the Hamburg State Opera, with his contract extended through 2025. He departed the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in 2020 and received the title of conductor emeritus in 2021.

Nagano is married to pianist Mari Kodama; the couple has recorded the complete cycle of Beethoven’s works for piano and orchestra.