I was born in Berkeley California but left Berkeley before I was a year old, because my parents finished Graduate School at the University.  Then I spent my childhood in a town along the pacific coast called Morro Bay, which is on the central coast, half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  I lived my entire life in California - I grew up a pure Californian!

And, with my 26 years at the Berkeley Symphony, I've never really left.  I've always kept a home there: I made my home in San Francisco.  It's not so much social ties that keep me there, but I find the geographical beauty of California, particularly Northern California, to be one of the most special places on earth, so I keep going back.

It's the drama of how this huge ocean gets to meet forest and mountains.  The Pacific Ocean is the biggest ocean on earth; the mighty Northern Californian redwoods are the tallest trees on earth.  The combination of the sea and the mountains and the natural beauty is pretty special for me.

Intriguingly, despite being aware of the composers such as Hovhaness who have been influenced in their music by that very landscape of America's West Coast, Nagano hasn't conducted any of the music. 

It is quite a unique landscape in itself and I suppose the people I feel have captured it the best are some of the more unusual composers. You might not even call them composers at all, Harry Partch for example, Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell. Yet John Adams is a long-time Californian now and occasionally you can hear a little bit of that in his music.

I have played quite a bit of Cowell's piano music, but Partch's music is not really written for traditional instruments.  With Lou Harrison's heavily Asian influenced music, I find it strange personally to hear things that are translated out of their traditional forms into a western context since, through my ancestry and that of my wife's family, I have always had contact with the original traditional forms.

So what of Britten's use of the Gamelan that so affected him after visiting Bali and became an integral part of so many of his scores? 

It's different somehow - in that however he uses it, it stills sounds like Britten!