Kent Nagano 70th Birthday – Culture

“What really counts,” writes conductor Kent Nagano, is so important to him that he has now turned it into a book, “10 Lessons of my Life”. The American, descendant of Japanese immigrants, recalls episodes with people that had a deeper effect on him. Nagano describes encounters with the Icelandic singer Björk, with Pierre Boulez and the pianist Alfred Brendel, with Leonard Bernstein (“How I learned that there are no definitive answers”) and Frank Zappa (“How I learned that true artists don’t tact” ). He loves openness and thoroughness in thinking. And in his book asks the existential question: “How do you learn integrity or truthfulness? Certainly not from books or on the Internet.”

Kent Nagano wasn’t a boy wonder. He was born in 1951 in a Californian fishing village on the Pacific between San Francisco and Los Angeles – not the scion of a family of musicians that would have propelled him to a later career. The father an architect, the mother a biologist who played the piano. Nagano buried himself in the keys early on and got to know European culture. Because a musician from Georgia, trained in Munich, brought art and philosophy closer to the young person, who loved the surfboard as much as the piano. This master turned the village into “a kind of musical laboratory”. So the desire arose to do “serious music” seriously.

For Nagano, the composer Olivier Messiaen remained the father figure of his artistic existence

After completing his university studies in San Francisco, Nagano began conducting; the Opera Company in Boston took him on as a répétiteur, his mentor there: the legendary manager and conductor Sarah Caldwell. When he was studying the music of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen at the orchestra podium, he wrote him a letter. Messiaen answered, went into detail on Nagano’s questions, friendship developed. The composer invited him to his home, Nagano traveled to Paris, remained a kind of son and student in Messiaen’s house for months. Became assistant to conductor Seiji Ozawa in 1984 at the world premiere of Messiaen’s mystical opera “Saint François d’Assise”. Years later he conducted it himself at the Salzburg Festival.

Messiaen, a church organist in Paris and speculatively connected to the Catholic faith, remained for Nagano the father figure of his artistic existence. He has conducted Messiaen’s intoxicated music countless times, recently presented the monumental orchestral poetry “La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ” on CD, performed confidently, powerfully and freely by the Bavarian Radio Choir and Symphony Orchestra.

Nagano continued to rely on Europe’s musical culture. In 1989 he became musical director of the Opéra National de Lyon, and also head of the traditional Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. Made his debut at the New York Metropolitan Opera. In 2000 he moved to the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, where he was able to live out his desire for experimental concert programs. An example: Nagano continued to conduct Brahms’ German Requiem, adding short new orchestral reflections by the composer Wolfgang Rihm between the seven sections.

In a new book, Kent Nagano asks, “How do you understand what posture is?” The conductor can be seen here with musicians from the “Chamber Orchestra of Europe” at a rehearsal in Cologne in 1999.

(Photo: Hermann Wöstmann / dpa / DPA-SZ)

Thirst for knowledge, curiosity about contemporary modernity and unconventional programs met Nagano’s affection for the familiar, for the deeply grown tradition. In 2006 he went to Munich as head of music at the Bavarian State Opera, where he had to hand over the podium to Kirill Petrenko after seven years of fighting. Nagano has been music director at Hamburg’s State Opera and the Philharmonic State Orchestra there since 2015, to his later happiness.

Studying the score, continually conducting operas and concerts, the stress of traveling – some conductors put their health and mind to good use. Nagano, which has remained slim and flexible on the podium, offers the counter-image to the old desk tyrant with an elegant habitus and communicative commitment. He defends the beauty of music and loves it especially in its existential melancholy and sadness. Has become wise. In the “10 Lessons of Life” he asks: “How do you internalize the meaning of humility? How do you maintain a minimum of openness over the years? How do you understand what attitude is?” Kent Nagano will, that is what he and we wish, deepen his philosophy of life and music.

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