Kent Nagano
conductor
Vita
Kent Nagano was born in California and studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. He was named Music Director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in 1978 and assisted Seiji Ozawa in the world premiere of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise in Paris in 1983. His international breakthrough came in 1984 with a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for which he received the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award. Nagano was appointed Music Director of the Opéra de Lyon in 1989 (until 1998); from 1991 to 2000, he served as Music Director of the Hallé Orchestra, and from 2000 to 2006 as Principal Conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He went on to lead the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (2006–20) and served as General Music Director at the Bavarian Staatsoper from 2006 to 2013. From 2015 until the summer of 2025, he held the same position at the Hamburg Staatsoper, where he concluded his tenure with two world premieres: Unsuk Chin’s Die dunkle Seite des Mondes and Rodolphe Bruneau-Boulmier’s Die Illusionen des William Mallory. In the 2026-27 season, Nagano will take up the position of Principal Conductor of the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España in Madrid. He has led many of the world’s leading orchestras and has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles and San Francisco Opera, La Scala in Milan, and the Berlin Staatsoper. At the Salzburg Festival, he conducted the world premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin, and at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, he premiered Pascal Dusapin’s Il Viaggio, Dante. Kent Nagano was appointed Honorary Conductor of Concerto Köln in 2019; together with this ensemble and the Dresdner Festspielorchester, he leads the historically informed project The Wagner Cycles of the Dresden Music Festival. His book Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected was published in 2014, followed in 2021 by 10 Lessons of My Life, a memoir about encounters that changed his life.
Lucerne Festival debut on 1 September 1998 with the Hallé Orchestra and the Arnold Schönberg Chor in Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise.
Mai 2025
Magazine
