Maestro at Bay

FANFAIR

CONDUCTOR KENT NAGANO HEADS FOR THE HILLS

Japanese-American conductor Kent Nagano, 49, has been a household name for nearly 10 years, but mainly in England, where he was music director of Manchester’s Halle Orchestra, and in France, where he led the Opera de Lyon. Although Nagano, a Bay Area native, has served as music director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra since 1978, most Americans have had to catch him in guest appearances with local orchestras. Meanwhile, music-lovers everywhere devoured the mane-wearing maestro’s remarkable recordings of such 20th-century operas as Benjamin Britten’s Billy Bucid and Olivier Messiaen’s Saint Francois d’Assise. Nobody, it seems, can make the dissonant harmonies, complex orchestrations, and shifting time signatures of this music sound better than Kent Nagano, who has enjoyed close friendships with composers as diverse as Messiaen and Frank Zappa. Nagano’s overdue homecoming began in September, when Placido Domingo, newly installed as artistic director of the Los Angeles Opera, appointed him principal conductor. (At about the same time, Nagano reinforced his roots in Europe, accepting a post as music director of Berlin’s Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester.) This month, he will conduct the American premiere of El Nino, John Adams’s new opera, with the San Francisco Symphony. Nagano is no stranger to Adams’s work, having conducted performances of the composer’s 1987 opera, Nixon in China, all over the world and recorded several of his works for Nonesuch records.

“It’s a telling of the story of the birth of Christ,” Nagano says of El Nino, “that is very different from, say, the telling as we know it in Handel’s Messiah. There’s not just one single Mary, one single Joseph—the characters are described in a more abstract way. It’s not all that often that you get to do something so important in your own city.”

MICHAEL HOGAN