Determined to Be Daring

Putting an opera on stage is always tense; putting on new and unusual opera especially so. The Los Angeles Opera plans at least one such new work a season from now on. It intends to create the most ambitious production ever of that most ambitious cycle of operas ever--Wagner’s “Ring.” And the company also wants to become everybody’s opera company, alert to its Hollywood home base and the Southland’s Latino and Asian populations as well.

The potential for jittery chaos in all this is tremendous. But however audacious Placido Domingo’s expectations are for opera in L.A., he has added a crucial safety net.

One of his first orders of business, when he was appointed artistic director of the company in 1999, was to persuade Kent Nagano--a bold visionary as well as a cautious, conscientious, meticulously elegant musician--to become its principal conductor. He now becomes the key player in Domingo’s efforts to increase the stature and solidify the identity of Los Angeles Opera.

But he is also more than that. It is he who has brought to the table many of the company’s most far-reaching ideas.

As principal conductor, he plays a significant role in determining programming, from the glitzy “action-adventure” “Ring” cycle to the new operas. To a large degree, it will also fall on his shoulders to make such ideas work, with his first test being the company’s new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin.”

In conversation, Nagano projects a curious mix of informal friendliness and a formal, respectful manner. He eschews colloquial expressions, peppers his remarks with foreign words pronounced with expert flourish and gives little away. While everyone else refers to the artistic director as Placido, Nagano in an interview calls him Mr. Domingo.

“My big goal,” says Nagano, summing up why he came to Los Angeles Opera, “is to help realize Mr. Domingo’s dream of an opera company you could only find here in Los Angeles.”

Sitting in an office at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion following his first full orchestra rehearsal, Nagano appears comfortable with his new position, if slightly lost (we did not attempt to meet in his office, which is somewhere deep in the basement).

Born in 1951 in Morro Bay (midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco), Nagano attended UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State in the early ‘70s. His flowing hair and oversized glasses recall the era. He is casual, in jeans and stocking feet. He is friendly, soft-spoken and easy to laugh. He was once even known as the conductor who surfs.

But nothing about Nagano is laid back. In 1999, when Domingo took over the company from retiring founding director Peter Hemmings, it was leaked that the tenor wanted Nagano as music director. Hearing that, I had asked a colleague of the conductor what he knew about the situation. Nothing, he said, and neither will anybody else for a long time.

“Kent doesn’t make quick decisions, he goes over everything in unbelievably close detail,” the colleague continued.

An official announcement did not come for nearly a year. During that time, the German Opera prematurely announced Nagano’s appointment as its music director. Nagano says he agonized over the offer, but felt he couldn’t take that job and still properly serve the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin, where he was already music director-designate.

Nor was Nagano willing to go all the way and accept the post of music director for Los Angeles Opera. Instead, he asked to be named principal conductor, which carries less responsibility and keeps the door open to expanding his role with the company later.

Nagano measures his words carefully. There is no drawing him into discussing delicate subjects, such as his situation in Germany. It was just last year that he began his duties as music director in Berlin, and he has already threatened to resign. The orchestra, which relies on support from the city of Berlin, has been placed under the authority of an umbrella city organization as part of an effort to bring down costs at arts institutions that the united Berlin is finding increasing difficult to support.

He is reluctant to say much. “It is really important to me that things aren’t somehow misconstrued and inflame a situation I am trying to keep really cool,” he explains. But he admits that “if we don’t come to an agreement by the middle of September, there will be pretty colorful consequences.”

Those consequences would be felt in Los Angeles; Nagano plans to bring his Berlin orchestra to the Music Center in December for the first local performance of Schoenberg’s “Moses and Aron.” Ultimately, Nagano is confident that the crisis will be resolved--Daniel Barenboim, who leads the German State Opera, and Simon Rattle, music-director designate at the Berlin Philharmonic, have recently resorted to similar threats and prevailed.

More than that, Nagano--this Californian whose career got its biggest international boost in France (where he was music director of the Lyon Opera from 1989 to 1998), who speaks French at home with his wife, pianist Mari Kodama, and their 21/2-year-old daughter, Karin--has no desire to leave Berlin. He says he feels more at home there than in Paris or San Francisco, where he also maintains homes.

“I really, really love the German culture and the rhythm of the city,” he explains. “Although I haven’t come up with any real explanations why that is, I think it has something to do with the type of social formality that still exists there. Traditional social mores are still very much in existence in Germany, whereas here on the West Coast, we’ve become very flexible, to the point sometimes you’re not even sure what is the appropriate behavior for the occasion.”

Nagano, who with “Lohengrin” is conducting his first staged Wagner opera, admires German cultural sophistication. “To be able to quote Goethe and not be thought an absolute idiot,” he explains, “is an example of the wonderful sense of the cultural sharing that you have there.”

Yet Nagano refuses to give up his West Coast roots. His career is centered in Europe (in addition to Lyon, he has served as music director of the Halle Orchestra in Manchester, England, and as principal guest conductor of the London Symphony; he regularly appears in Paris and at the Salzburg Festival), but his loyalty to his first orchestra, the Berkeley Symphony, is unprecedented in the modern age of conductor careerism.

Founded as a countercultural answer to the university-sponsored musical life of Berkeley in the late ‘60s, it was once known as the Berkeley Free Orchestra. When Nagano became music director in 1979, it had reached a small degree of professionalism, but just. Nagano and the orchestra grew up together. He proposed preposterous projects and then made them happen. One was a festival of the massive, complex orchestral works of Olivier Messiaen, which led to a near-familial relationship with the celebrated French composer.

Now Nagano and the orchestra are more respectable, but the ensemble is still a community operation, struggling to keep afloat. It does so because Nagano continues to lead it. And he still insists on pushing it--every program this season, for instance, has at least one world premiere.

“On one hand, I do it virtually for nothing,” Nagano admits, complaining about the crazy commute from Europe. “But on the other hand, I do it almost for everything, because the ties to the community are very important to me. It’s a pretty hostile financial climate and the competition is severe. I feel it’s important to have a sense of stability and to protect the now relatively long tradition that the orchestra has. And I’ve always felt too strongly for the West Coast to want to let go of it. If I’m going to call a place home, I have to be involved with the community.”

It is exactly those qualities of arrestingly ambitious ideas, cultural seriousness and focus on community that Nagano has in mind for Los Angeles Opera.

“I know it is nothing that could happen for at least 30 years, if at all,” he said last year, after his L.A. appointment, “but I would like us to work toward making Los Angeles Opera the greatest company in the country. And to do that we have to reflect this incredible community we have here while at the same time respecting the great European tradition of opera.”The most spectacularly ambitious idea now afoot at Los Angeles Opera is the planned production of the “Ring,” with special effects by Industrial Light & Magic. “Since I live in the Bay Area, I have quite a few friends who are connected with the various George Lucas enterprises, so Industrial Light & Magic seemed like a natural place to go.”

To build on European tradition, he says, he asked Domingo to have “a Berio line,” a series of three new operas by Italy’s most important living composer, Luciano Berio. The first will be Puccini’s “Turandot” in late May, with a new ending by Berio for the final scene, which Puccini left in sketches at his death.

Next season, Berio will create a new version of Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea.” As it turns out, Domingo has longed to sing the countertenor (or mezzo-soprano) role of Nero in the 1642 opera, and Berio will make an arrangement of the work to suit the tenor’s range.

But the most intriguing Berio project will be an entirely new work. Nagano describes it as “a short opera about a great living tenor who is at the very prime of his career, a one-act biography of what his life had been through a series of flashbacks.”

The role will be written for Domingo. And so the obvious question is: Does this mean Domingo will perform as the hero in his own life story on the lyric stage? “There will be indirect and abstract references to a living artist” is all Nagano will say.

The Berio line is for Nagano, however, just the start of what he feels is an opera company’s responsibility to its time and place. “The great wish of mine, what is really important to me, is that we assume the role as an American opera house and take that role seriously,” he says. “And by seriously I mean not simply applying for grants and performing American opera.

“That’s too easy. It doesn’t actually respect our tradition enough. I mean really taking a serious look at what kinds of cultural influences America has had on the globe. And we must take the time to seek out the voices of the next generation and discover where the next currents of change are coming from and then make sure that those currents run through the opera company.

“Those currents,” Nagano adds, mean young composers, still in their 20s and early 30s, and those particularly who are up to things he has never seen before. But he also means mass culture America, which, he says, is how John Williams’ name came up. But when Domingo announced last year that Williams had been asked to write an opera for the company, the popular composer let it be known that he had not yet agreed. And rumors that Woody Allen might be involved were never confirmed.

Nagano says he is not at liberty to talk about the current state of this commission but proudly says that Williams was the first person he approached for an all-American opera.

“He is such a respected composer and such a respected musician, and his music is loved throughout the entire world,” Nagano says. “So I felt that if his great gift for lyricism and for melody could be put into the framework of an operatic-like structure, this is something the whole world would notice.”

As far as Nagano is concerned, this need not be a traditional opera, “as long as a theatrical element, a dramatic element and, indeed, a lyric element are involved.” Nagano admits that the project has not been smooth, but he has remained obstinate. “And to my great amazement, the project, while it hasn’t come together yet, is still very much alive.”

This patient determination has long served Nagano well in the world of new opera. When he assumed the music directorship of the Lyon Opera, he immediately commissioned three composers to write operas. He waited 10 years for the first, which was Peter Eotvos’ “Three Sisters,” a riveting interpretation of Chekhov’s play, in which the three sisters are sung by three countertenors. It proved an international sensation--Deutsche Grammophon recorded the premiere, and the opera has had several performances since, most recently three weeks ago at the Edinburgh Festival. The second opera, by George Benjamin, is still on the way, and Nagano remains excited by its prospects.

The third was his most cherished idea, and a heartbreak. Five years after commissioning Toru Takemitsu, he received a call from the Japanese composer in December 1995 saying that the opera was finished. At the time, Takemitsu was in remission from prostate cancer, but he took a turn for the worse and died a few weeks later. Nagano learned that Takemitsu did not leave a manuscript score. “It turns out what he meant when he called is that he had finished composing the opera in his head. All he had to do was write it down, which he never had a chance to do.”

If Takemitsu took what might have been his crowning masterpiece to the grave with him, Nagano has had exceptional success with other projects. He helped shepherd the touchy premiere of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” John Adams’ 1991 opera that looked into the mind of terrorist and victim. Last year, Nagano premiered the first two great operas of the 21st century--Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” in Salzburg (which he will also conduct next summer at the Santa Fe Opera) and John Adams’ opera/oratorio “El Nino” in Paris (which Nonesuch has just released on CD).

Nagano has also taken a strong interest in a young Korean composer, Unsuk Chin. She is his composer-in-residence in Berlin and, he says, he has secured a Los Angeles Opera commission for her, although it has yet to be formally announced and a subject and librettist are undecided.

Clearly, though, Nagano still needs to see how feasible are his and Domingo’s grand plans. The orchestra, for instance, had never been a company priority, and he requires considerable support to improve it. For the “Lohengrin,” he demanded, and got, double the normal rehearsal time. His first upgrade has been to hire a new concertmaster--Stuart Canin, one of the Bay’s Area’s most respected violinists and the concertmaster of the Berkeley Symphony.

Our meeting came after his first rehearsal for “Lohengrin” with the full orchestra; it was too soon, and Nagano is too politic, to comment. But he did say he was beginning to understand the sheer scope of the challenge that awaits him.

Indeed, it could well prove the most daunting challenge of Nagano’s career. Under the best of circumstances, no one could turn Los Angeles Opera into the greatest company in the country overnight, and the circumstances at Los Angeles Opera, under the restless Domingo, will likely never be less than chaotic. But, with the proper institutional support, Nagano could, in that deceptively determined way, make Los Angeles Opera the flashiest and, at the same time, most elegant company in America, and that might be even better.