5 - Opéra de Lyon

Within three months of taking over at the Opéra de Lyon, Nagano had taken the company into the recording studio to record Prokofiev's frivolous early operatic masterpiece L'Amour des Trois Oranges in the première recording of the original French version (Virgin, 1989). There followed a series of recordings of productions acclaimed in the opera house, including Strauss' own French version of Salomé (Virgin, 1991) and the original version of Ariadne auf Naxos with the Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, entitled Der Bürger als Edelmann (Virgin, 1997).
 
Other releases for Virgin have included Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites (1992), a Busoni double-bill, Arlecchino and Turandot (1993) and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1994), while for Erato Nagano recorded Debussy's unfinished Rodrigue et Chiméne (orchestrated by Edison Denisov; 1995), Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffman, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (both 1996), Massenet's Werther (1997) and Busoni's Doktor Faust (1999), with both completions by Busoni's pupil Philipp Jarnach, and Anthony Beaumont - which won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording.
 
For Deutsche Grammophon's exciting 20/21 contemporary music series Nagano recorded Peter Eötvös' startling operatic version of Chekov's Three Sisters (1999), where the protagonists are sung by three counter-tenors. Perhaps most controversial was Nagano's première and subsequent recording of John Adams' second opera The Death of Klinghoffer (Nonesuch, 1992), to which he is returning for a TV production with the London Symphony Orchestra.
 
With the orchestra alone, Nagano recorded over a dozen discs or repertoire which extended from Bruch concerti to Varese and Kurt Weill.
 
With the Opéra de Lyon, Nagano made a hugely successful visit to Japan in September 1997 with a production of Bizet's Carmen.