L.A. Opera Names Nagano Principal Conductor

Confirming months of rumors, Californian Kent Nagano has been named principal conductor of Los Angeles Opera by the company’s artistic director-designate, Placido Domingo.

The position, effective in July 2001, one year after Domingo takes charge, marks the first time the 14-year-old opera company has created a position of such significance for a conductor.

Celebrated for his love of 20th century composers, the 48-year-old San Francisco resident currently leads England’s Halle Orchestra and will take charge of Berlin’s Deutsche Symphonie in September. He is the former music director of the Lyon Opera, a position he relinquished in 1998. Since 1978 he has served as music director and conductor of the Berkeley Symphony. His Grammy Award-winning recording career includes standard opera fare as well as more unusual works including Messaien’s “St. Francis of Assisi” and John Adams’ “Death of Klinghoffer.”

In a telephone interview from Berlin, Nagano said Thursday that accepting a new position in California feels like “coming home.”

“I think L.A. has evolved in the most amazing way,” he said. “It is an amazing powerhouse of ideas and energy, and a gateway to the rest of the world.

“I think Maestro Domingo had a lot to do with why I took the job; he came to me and told me the wonderful ideas he had, the plans, and he felt he wanted, and needed, to work with a partner to build a house that would really be perfect for the community around it, the kind of house you would find nowhere else in the world. That is a tremendous challenge.”

Domingo acknowledged he had been trying to lure Nagano for almost a year. “He is considered one of the great conductors of today,” Domingo said by phone from Bayreuth, where he is rehearsing for July performances at the annual summer Bayreuth Festival. “He has a lot of charisma, he has a lot of knowledge, he is a musician with a very big background. He is a very interesting choice for this city because of his knowledge of avant-garde composers.”

Nagano says that he would like to see L.A. Opera honor tradition, but eschew habit. “How do I explain this right--habit is something comfortable, and convenient. Tradition is something that is living, and inspiring. When the two get confused, you can get yourself into a situation that is less than totally satisfying.”

Nagano will relinquish his role at the Halle Orchestra in the next year. To accept the L.A. post, he turned down the music directorship of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. According to Domingo, he was offered the music director title in L.A. but refused it, saying he did not want to take on the administrative duties traditionally handled by the music director, given his new duties at the Deutsche Symphonie and his ongoing commitment to the Berkeley Symphony.

“[I don’t] rule [the title] out some day in the future,” Nagano said. “But at the moment I have enormous and important responsibilities with the institutions with whom I work in Europe.”

Domingo made it clear that, with or without the title, he considers Nagano to be the company’s music director. “It’s just a title, and he doesn’t want to take it,” Domingo said. “He will [have to] take on some of the headaches. I am an artistic director, and I do many other things like raising money--my work goes farther than the artistic. . . . Today, I think we artistic people are also involved in the administration.”

Edgar Baitzel, who will serve as artistic administrator of L.A. Opera under Domingo, said Nagano will conduct between 35% and 40% of the opera’s performances in his first season--a percentage he calls higher than that of most music directors at major opera companies. He added that Nagano will be responsible for selecting a “short but very fine” list of guest conductors who will take charge of the remaining operas. Baitzel said that L.A. Opera is aiming for a connection with the Kirov Opera and its conductor, Valery Gergiev, and new collaborations with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Nagano joins the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 41-year-old music director Esa-Pekka Salonen and Grant Gershon, 39, recently named music director of the Master Chorale, as the third in a high-profile trio of young conductors leading the resident music companies at downtown’s Los Angeles Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County.

“With the new appointments, I think we have quite an exciting team of young--or youngish--leaders who are able and willing to collaborate,” Salonen said in a telephone interview Thursday. “This is the first time in history that there is actually a team of the same generation, a team that shares a lot of ideas and points of view. There are no identical musical tastes here, but I can very much sympathize with Kent’s musical leanings. I think he is one of the most important composers of his generation.”

Nagano was born Nov. 22, 1951, in Berkeley, where his parents, both second-generation Japanese Americans, were graduate students (his father in architecture, his mother in microbiology). The first members of the Nagano family came to the United States in the 1800s. Before Nagano turned 1, his parents moved to a farm in Morro Bay owned by the Nagano family, joining the family business.

Trained in both Japanese and Western musical traditions, Nagano began studying piano at age 4, later taking up the viola and the clarinet. He received his bachelor’s degree in sociology and music from UC Santa Cruz and his master’s degree in music from San Francisco State University. Nagano came to the attention of the worldwide music community in 1984, when he conducted the Boston Symphony in a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 on one day’s notice.

Nagano lives in San Francisco with his wife, pianist Mari Kodama, and daughter Karin Kei, who is a year and 7 months old.