Photo by Koji Sasahara
From his Morro Bay birthplace to his early career in the Bay Area (where he is still a part-time resident), Kent Nagano, 61, went on to numerous prominent positions in Europe as conductor and music director, but kept moving — as many in the profession's top echelon do.
At the end of his current season as music director of the Bavarian State Opera, Nagano will leave Munich, and now the La Presse reports that Kent Nagano will leave his position as music director when his contract expires in 2016 as music director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.
Paul Wells comments in Maclean's:
My hunch is that it’s Nagano, not the orchestra board, who is deciding on this early-ish and amicable divorce. His parallel career in Germany is a moving target: He finishes at the Bavarian State Opera this year, and begins at the Hamburg State Opera in 2015. He’s moving on. Who could replace him? It’s a crucial decision for any orchestra.Montreal will now be looking for a music director at the same time as Boston and Berlin. Millions of dollars, and a municipal pride that in Montreal extends far beyond the poncy elites you might expect to worry about such things, ride on the outcome. The OSM got lucky with Nagano. It needs to get lucky again, sooner than it probably hoped.
[Nagano's departure] is a bit of a surprise. He will have been leading the orchestra’s fortunes for nine years when the 2015-2016 season ends. Charles Dutoit, who made it one of the world’s leading orchestras and then left (in an awful huff at the musicians’ union) in 2002, had lasted 25 years. Nagano will be 65 in 2016 and could have lasted many more years. He’s just finishing a second season at the new Jack Diamond-designed Maison symphonique, a bland-looking but superb-sounding hall Jean Charest built partly to keep Nagano happy. His Montreal career looks a little foreshortened.
I hear through the musicians’ grapevine that Nagano is not universally loved by the OSM. He is seen as a micromanager who doesn’t let the players bring enough of their own insight to the music. But I doubt that would have counted for much in the board’s decision about his continued tenure. Lucien Bouchard chairs the orchestra board and he’s a close Nagano ally, and for good reason: the concert plays to near-constant sold-out houses (helped by the fact that the Maison symphonique is hundreds of seats smaller than Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, the band’s old venue). And Montrealers are still over the moon about Nagano. It’s an extended crush that you have to see to believe.
Nagano led the Berkeley Symphony from 1978 through 2009, and has also held positions as music director of Opéra de Lyon (1988-1998), Hallé Orchestra of Manchester (1992-1999), Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (2000-2006), Los Angeles Opera (2001-2006, and the Bavarian State Opera and Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (both from 2006).