Kent Nagano

The American conductor Kent Nagano is as much at home in the classical-romantic repertoire as he is in the music of our time. With great commitment and a spirit of discovery, he also champions lesser-known works and succeeds in winning over both musicians and audiences. Berlin audiences remember Kent Nagano fondly from his tenure as Chief Conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester from 2000 to 2006. After his departure, the orchestra appointed him Honorary Conductor in recognition of his outstanding contributions.

Kent Nagano was born in 1951 in Berkeley, California, and gained important professional experience as assistant to Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. A pivotal moment in his conducting career was Olivier Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise, for which Messiaen himself recommended that the young musician be entrusted with a key role in preparing the premiere of this highly demanding work. As a token of his esteem, Messiaen later bequeathed his piano to Nagano. Following the successful premiere of the opera, Nagano’s career continued in Europe: he was appointed Music Director of the Opéra National de Lyon (1988–1998) and shortly afterwards also of the Hallé Orchestra (1991–2000). Since 2006, Kent Nagano has served as General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera and Music Director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. In addition, in 2003 he became the first Music Director of Los Angeles Opera, having held the position of Chief Conductor there for two years.

At the Bavarian State Opera, Nagano quickly made a strong impact. World premieres of operas by Wolfgang Rihm (Das Gehege, paired with Richard Strauss’s Salome) and Unsuk Chin (Alice in Wonderland) stood alongside new productions of rarely performed works such as Britten’s Billy Budd and Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina. He also conducted core repertoire from Mozart to Strauss in Munich, as well as numerous academy and special concerts. At the centre of the current season is a monumental project: a new staging of the complete Ring des Nibelungen within a single season.
As an internationally sought-after artist, Kent Nagano appears with the world’s leading orchestras. He regularly conducts the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. He has premiered and, in some cases, recorded major works, including Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’amour de Loin, Leonard Bernstein’s A White House Cantata, Peter Eötvös’s Chekhov opera Three Sisters, and John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer and El Niño.

Over more than two decades of recording activity, Kent Nagano has produced an impressive number of albums, many of which have received prestigious international awards. He is currently engaged in an extensive recording project of Beethoven’s orchestral works with his Montreal orchestra.