ENIGMATIC CONDUCTOR FOR THE FUTURE?
Kent Nagano conducts Alexander Zemlinsky’s opera "Der König Kandaules" and Arnold Schoenberg’s oratorio "Die Jakobsleiter"
For the CD recording of Ferruccio Busoni’s Doktor Faust Kent Nagano was awarded a Grammy (he conducted performances at the 1999 Salzburg Festival) and in the Musical America Directory, the almanac of international concert organisers, he is listed with the honorary title “Conductor of the Year 2001”. Kent Nagano was born in 1951 in San Francisco and success seems to come easily to him. He is open-minded, persistently analytical and constantly analysing various styles of creativity and interpretation.
20th Century opera
In the early 1990s Kent Nagano achieved acclaim for his conducting of John Adams’ opera The Death of Klinghoffer in Brussels, Lyons and Vienna. His debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1994 with Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites and the concert performance of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd in 1998 rapidly brought him renown as one of the most important conductors of 20th-century opera. Kent Nagano is not afraid to take on unusual projects and especially not when it is a question of overlapping electronic and acoustic music. We only have to think of the refined synchronisation between the South-West German Radio Symphony Orchestra and the technical machinery of IRCAM at the world premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’amour de loin in the Felsenreitschule at the Salzburg Festival in 2000. Since autumn 2000 Kent Nagano has been principal conductor of the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin and since last year first guest conductor of the Los Angeles Opera where he has embarked on a Wagner project with Plácido Domingo. Earlier in his career Kent Nagano was music director at the Opéra de Lyon and principal conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, who played for the revival of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise at the Salzburg Festival in 1998.
Reinhard Kriechbaum
Alfred Hrdlicka,
Adoration II, 1986