An era calls again to Nagano

EXPLAINING his reason for including three composers in his project to create a narrative symphonic work about the experiences of Japanese Americans in the World War II internment camp Manzanar -- a work he conducted at UCLA this month -- Kent Nagano told The Times that he felt the context was broad. There were many stories to relate, he well knew, his parents and grandparents having been among those interned, and he liked the idea of more than one musical point of view.

In fact, three may not have been enough.

On Saturday night, Nagano, currently finishing the Los Angeles Opera season leading “Falstaff” and “Der Rosenkavalier,” will conduct the premiere of yet another work about the internment experience: “Regarding Executive Order 9066,” a composition for orchestra, mezzo-soprano and narrator by Garry Eister. The premiere will be part of a benefit concert for the San Luis Obispo Youth Symphony, the orchestra in which his participation persuaded a teenage Nagano, who grew up in Morro Bay, to exchange his surfboard for a baton. The music director of the ensemble now is his cousin Nancy Nagano.

Eister, who lives in Arroyo Grande, near Pismo Beach, is a quintessential California eclectic with penchants for glass instruments (Linda Ronstadt produced a “glass music” CD for him), microtuning, Persian and Latin American music, Minimalism, performance and installation art, and a certain traditionalism (he wrote an opera of “Moby-Dick”).

The infamous Executive Order 9066, signed in 1942 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, encouraged the Army to incarcerate Japanese Americans during the war, and Eister’s texts are taken from accounts by internees.

The concert will be given at the Christopher Cohan Center in San Luis Obispo.

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Mark Swed