With feet firmly planted in both camps - symphonic repertoire and opera - Nagano had thought that with his move to the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin in September 2000 that opera may take a back seat for a while.

I left the Opéra de Lyon after nearly 12 years there.  At the same time I stepped down from the Hallé Orchestra - the two posts having run parallel - and I thought with the move to Berlin that I would not conduct opera for a while, except in very unusual and specific circumstances.  That's where both the repertoire and the working conditions happen to fit: usually one production in Paris at the Théâtre du Chatelet, and one production in Salzburg and that was it.  The rest of the year was strictly devoted to symphonic repertoire. 

I did primarily symphonic repertoire for three, almost four years.  Then Plácido Domingo came to see me and asked me to join him in Los Angeles but I declined, and I still have not agreed to go there as Music Director.  However I did agree to go there as his partner, as Principal Conductor but not in an administrative role with responsibility.  So I usually do a couple of productions out there a year, but I try to keep it to a minimum.  One of the things that I've always felt is that in my case it's important for me not to try to do too many things at the same time; it's better to stay in one place and do it really thoroughly: 12 years in Lyon is an example; nine in Manchester, and I'm at the start of a long period in Berlin, let alone the 26 years in Berkeley.  I don't really move around that much.

Sometimes Nagano's schedule looks fairly hectic though, such as a run of performances in Los Angeles of Don Giovanni, during which he dashed back to Germany for two performances of Mahler's Seventh Symphony and squeezed in a short period with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra.

The schedule gets thick - but I made a commitment to the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin and I was unwilling to modify or renege on that commitment.  The conditions have always been that, as long as I can maintain my commitment to the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin as that was the first one there, then - as I said to Plácido Domingo, for example - of course, 'I would love to work with you.'  The priorities have always been really clear - but I like to work quite hard for my orchestra.

His tenure in Los Angeles started with a very well regarded production of Wagner's Lohengin, the opening of which was set against the tragedy of 11 September 2001.  Nagano was actually flying from Berlin at the time: 'We were about an hour and a half from L A,' he recalls, 'somewhere over Calgary, Canada, and the plane suddenly turned 180 degrees.  After about an hour of flying in the wrong direction, and seeing the Rocky Mountains, which had just disappeared, reappear again, the captain came on the intercom and told us we had been ordered to go back to Germany.  But he didn't tell us why.' The passengers eventually got to know in Iceland, when the plane landed to refuel. The flight returned to Frankfurt but couldn't land there and was diverted to Leipzig.  Nagano had to try other routes to get to Los Angeles; he got himself to Munich while the company devised a circuitous alternative route.  He flew to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to Mexico City.  From there he caught a 'puddle jumper' to Guadalajara, and then on to the border town of Tijuana, where a car was waiting to drive him to L A. One final delay of two hours unveiled itself at the border; a bomb scare at the crossing!

His opening season also saw critically acclaimed performances of Blubeard's Castle, Gianni Schicchi and Turandot with the new ending by Luciano Berio which was followed in January 2003 by Berio's realisation of an orchestration of Monteverdi's Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda in which Domingo will sing Nero. Don Giovanni in May 2003 was the first in a series of Mozart operas which was followed by Idomeneo in 2004, in which Domingo sang the title role, and Le Nozze di Figaro in the Spring of 2006. Domingo and Nagano collaborated once again at the end of 2005 in Robert Wilson's highly successful production of Parsifal. Opera News wrote:

In a program note, Placido Domingo suggests that in Parsifal the conductor can be the star of the show; in LA, this is arguably the case. Over the years, Kent Nagano has turned the LA Opera Orchestra into one of the finest groups of its type in the country, and this Parsifal was one of its most impressive efforts. Under Nagano's baton, the orchestra played with a fluency and muscularity that endowed Wagner's allusive poem with dramatic coherence and explored the whole emotional range of the drama. Especially notable were those passages where urgent tremolos on the lower strings reveal the abyss of anxiety that constantly underlies and threatens to engulf the ecstatic vision evoked by so much of the score.