Kent Nagano is an American conductor who has been music director of major orchestras and opera houses and recorded many successful albums including three that have won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. Currently, he is principal music director and conductor of the Hamburg State Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra with a contract that runs to 2020.
Born in northern California a third-generation Japanese-American, he studied music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the San Francisco State University and the École Normale de Musique de Paris. He conducted first with the Opera Company of Boston and for many years he was conductor of the Berkeley Symphony. He has also conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was music director of the Ojai Music Festival in California. With the London Symphony Orchestra in 1982, he conducted several orchestral works by Frank Zappa, some of which were recorded.
As music director of the Opéra de Lyon for ten years from 1988, he made many recordings of works by composers such as Busoni, Debussy, Richard Strauss and Kurt Weill. During the '90s, he was principal conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, England, after which he was named principal conductor and artistic director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin where he made recordings of works by Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and Schoenberg. He had a stint with the Los Angeles Opera in the first decade of the 21st century and also worked with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, the Bavarian State Opera, the Russian National Orchestra and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.
