Kent Nagano

Kent George Nagano (born November 22, 1951) is an American conductor and opera administrator. He has been the music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra since 2006 and is general music director of the Hamburg State Opera since 2015 through 2020.

Nagano was born in Berkeley, California, while his parents were in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Sansei, which means that he is a third generation Japanese-American.

He grew up in Morro Bay, a city located on the Central Coast of California in San Luis Obispo County. He studied sociology and music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduation, he moved to San Francisco State University to study music. While there, he took composition courses from Grosvenor Cooper and Roger Nixon. He also studied at the École Normale de Musique de Paris.

Nagano's first conducting job was with the Opera Company of Boston, where he was assistant conductor to Sarah Caldwell. In 1978, he became the conductor of the Berkeley Symphony, his first music directorship. He stepped down from this position in 2009. During his tenure in Berkeley, Nagano became a champion of the music of Olivier Messiaen and initiated a correspondence with him. He was later invited to work with Messiaen on the final stages of his opera Saint François d'Assise in Paris, where he lived with Messiaen and his wife Yvonne Loriod, whom he came to regard as his "European parents".

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