Word: berkeleys
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...lovers have amused themselves with a rather desperate parlor game: Where will the next great maestro come from? And when? Well, here's one answer: from California, and right now. From his dazzling appearances during the past two weeks with the Lyons Opera and Ballet in San Francisco and Berkeley, Kent Nagano has confirmed his spot at the head of the class of young conductors leading music into the future...
...soft-spoken, long-haired Nagano, 43, has so far managed to avoid the kind of premature hype that can capsize a career. Indeed, the onetime beach boy from Morro Bay, California, is still not widely known in the U.S., holding only the modest post of conductor of the Berkeley Symphony. "There's nothing wrong with wanting to be well known," says Nagano, "but that doesn't work for me. I just try to let my enthusiasm for what I'm doing guide me to where I'm going...
...Angeles and San Francisco. He studied conducting at San Francisco State University and sang with the San Francisco Opera chorus before joining Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston as an apprentice conductor. Returning to the Bay Area in 1979, he won a reputation by leading the small Berkeley Promenade Orchestra (now the Berkeley Symphony) in such unlikely concert-opera ventures as Hans Pfitzner's Palestrina and Janacek's The Excursions of Mr. Broucek...
...preparing a series of concerts devoted to the thorny yet passionately spiritual music of the late Olivier Messiaen, Nagano sent the French composer a tape -- and got back a detailed written critique, enumerating what he had done right and wrong. The correspondence eventually led to Messiaen's arrival in Berkeley for a performance of The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ and to Nagano's participation in the 1983 world premiere in Paris of Messiaen's radiant opera St. Francis of Assisi. Eight years later, he led the controversial world premiere of composer John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer...
...long list of American heroes I add Captain O'Grady. But he comes only after his parents, who raised a courageous, compassionate, resourceful and quick-witted son. Zan Jedde Haleem Berkeley Lake, Georgia...