FIRE ON THE PODIUM

By Michael Walsh

Since the death in the past few years of conductors Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, music 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.

Hailed by New York magazine as "the next Bernstein" after his Metropolitan Opera debut last year, the 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."

Mostly he has been doing that overseas. Simultaneously, Nagano is music director in Lyons, France; leader of the venerable Halla Orchestra in Manchester, England; and associate principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. As flamboyant on the podium as his mentor Seiji Ozawa but far more probing and analytical, Nagano wields his baton with the alan of a lion tamer cracking a whip. His lank, dark hair flies, his arms soar skyward, and a broad smile crosses his face: the laid-back, almost diffident surfer dude is suddenly transformed into the happiest dervish in the world.

Musically, Nagano has full command of a repertoire both wide and deep, moving with ease between the limpid grace of the classical period and the densest, most fearsome modern scores. His six-year tenure in Lyons has been marked both by important premieres (Debussy's unfinished Rodrigue et Chimene) and by alternative versions of such staples as Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann; in Manchester he champions a group of young, modernist British composers. "I guess I take an awful lot of risks," says Nagano. "But what I'm trying to do is make music an active, living art form that people today can relate to."

Nagano's skills were in ample evidence during the first-ever visit of the adventurous Lyons company to America, part of the 50th-anniversary celebration of the U.N. in San Francisco. Leading Prokofiev's slight, charming fable The Love for Three Oranges, he managed to find wit and poetry in an opera that is often little more than the famous March. Even more impressive was his way with a stripped-down, hopped-up Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev's great ballet. Designed by the Belgrade-born underground-comic-book illustrator Enki Bilal and choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj, this Romeo takes place in a Mad Max universe where the Capulets and the Montagues are fascist thugs and street ragamuffins, and Juliet sports a bustier whose exaggerated nipples fairly scream "radical Eurotrash reinterpretation." Yet thanks to Bilal's dark vision, Preljocaj's audaciously violent, erotic choreography and Nagano's incendiary way with the score, the piece worked brilliantly.

The grandson of first-generation Japanese-American farmers -- who, along with his parents, were interned during World War II -- Nagano grew up on a 500-acre artichoke farm on the West Coast halfway between Los 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.

While 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 in Brussels.

Despite his hectic schedule, Nagano has found time for a personal life. He married the Japanese-born pianist Mari Kodama in 1992. He still takes time out twice a year for a surfing holiday. Looking out over the Pacific Ocean from his hilltop home in San Francisco, he speaks wistfully of settling down, although that isn't likely soon. He is busily planning events in Lyons and Manchester well into the next millennium. "I like coming up with new ideas," he says. "And if I fail once in a while, it's worth it." Anyone who has heard him conduct can only agree.