Watch Kent Nagano, ‘Boris Godunov’ live online from Munich on Friday

When California native Kent Nagano resigned as the first music director of the newest major American opera company, Los Angeles Opera, in 2006 to become general music director of Bavarian State Opera, he entered into an Old World operatic hornet’s nest.

Now after seven rocky and never uneventful seasons -- which have included magnificent triumphs such as his recent “Ring” cycle -- he departs at the end of the month to move to Hamburg State Opera in 2015.

Nagano’s last new production for Munich is typically daring: a “Boris Godunov,” directed by Calitxo Bieto, the baddest of bad boy European opera directors (famous for sex, gore and degradation and for having required a men’s chorus in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” to sing in toilet stalls with their pants down).

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In “Boris,” Putin comes in for a roasting, as does George W. Bush. No timid American opera wusses, these bold Bavarians. The company will stream a live video of Friday night’s performance in Munich free of charge on its staatsoper.tv website. That’s 11 a.m. in Los Angeles, where Nagano had once hoped to put on a “Boris” at L.A. Opera (where the Mussorgsky masterpiece has yet to be mounted).

Expect here, mainly, political savagery against superpowers. Expect too, musical glory. Every Nagano performance in Munich I’ve attended has been fresh and magnificent, including and especially his recent “Ring” cycle.

Ironically, Nagano’s successor Kirill Petrenko, who takes over in the fall, will be in the operatic news Friday night as well, when he makes his Bayreuth Festival debut in a new production of Wagner’s “Ring.” The director is another provocateur -- Frank Castorf. The sets will include a Marxist Mt. Rushmore (with the faces of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao), the New York Stock Exchange, and a motel on Route 66. Angela Merkel is a regular at the festival.

What it all means, we’ll have to wait to find out. But if a kind of classical music Cold War is occurring in Germany, the Russians may be winning. In Munich, not only is Petrenko replacing Nagano at the Staatsoper, but Russia’s top conductor, Valery Gergiev, will succeed veteran American maestro Lorin Maazel at the Munich Philharmonic. Meanwhile, yet another Russian podium superstar, Mariss Jansons, continues to head Munich’s Bavarian Radio Orchestra. Petrenko, by the way, takes over Beito’s “Boris” next season.

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