By Mark Swed

Think of a quality that describes Kent Nagano, and you can probably find in him the opposite, as well. Elegance and liquid grace are a first impression as he walks on the stage: He seems to physically glide into the music when he lifts his baton and begins. Yet just as distinct an impression will be Nagano's bracingly dry metrical precision and exciting rhythmic definitions. He is the master of the long, sensuous, lyric line; he is also the master of the exciting, incisive, hard-edged, percussive attack. He is soft-spoken; yet he is a fiercely tenacious advocate of visionary 20th-century composers. He is among the most cosmopolitan of American musicians in Europe-nine years music director of the Lyon Opéra, that most French of companies; nine years music director of England's oldest orchestra, the Hallé, in Manchester; now, music director of the Deutsches-Symphonie in Berlin. A third-generation Japanese, he has cultivated his Asian background, as well.

Yet there is no major conductor with a more Californian soul or connection to the West Coast, which makes Musical America's Conductor of the Year an ideal choice to become the first principal conductor of Los Angeles Opera this year. Nagano grew up in Morro Bay, midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. His teenage years were typical of the state-sports cars, rock 'n' roll, surfing. But that, too, is deceptive. Nagano's parents were sophisticated academics; his microbiologist mother and architect father had left posts at the University of California at Berkeley to help out on the family farm after his Japanese grandparents returned from internment during World War II. He played viola, clarinet, koto, and electric rock guitar as a boy. His music education was also typically California eccentric. He studied sociology and music at the rustic University of California campus in Santa Cruz, where the three-toed sloth is school mascot. The area's musical associations are with the great experimental and multicultural West Coast tradition of Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison.

Like other California conductors-including the Angelenos Michael Tilson Thomas (Musician of the Year, 1971, and Conductor of the Year, 1995), David Robertson (Conductor of the Year, 2000), and Leonard Slatkin-Nagano went east to make a career. As Ozawa's assistant at the Boston Symphony, Nagano created a sensation by conducting the orchestra in a nuanced performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony on one day's notice and without rehearsal. Still, unlike the others, Nagano has never pulled out a single West Coast root. Despite his increasing European fame and importance, Nagano has faithfully-some might even think bizarrely-remained music director of the Berkeley Symphony, which was a scraggly and financially moribund community orchestra when he took charge of it 22 years ago.

But Nagano's loyalty to community orchestra and home state only emphasizes further his global vision combined with very specific attachments. It was with the Berkeley Symphony that Nagano first applied his quiet determination to the realization of astonishingly ambitious projects, such as surveying Olivier Messiaen's epic orchestral works in the early 1980s. This led to a close personal relationship with a composer who is increasingly being seen as a pivotal figure in late 20th-century music. Nagano, now, is the conductor best able to reconcile the modernist, religious, sexual, and nature-loving elements of Messiaen's music.

The same quiet determinism that brings insight into Messiaen has proven to have a downright transformative power in opera. Nagano served as a serious and stabilizing navigator through the stormy partisan and ethnic politics that surrounded John Adams's controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which he conducted at its premiere in Brussels. At the Lyon Opéra, Nagano guided a relatively conservative and provincial company into an era of gleaming and elegant modernity. His first recordings made with the company-French versions of Strauss's Salome and Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges-were instant and award-winning international sensations. He gave a remarkably subtle and refined new sensibility to Puccini when he brought in the great Japanese architect Arata Isozaki to design sets for the company's first Madama Butterfly, and the legendary Japanese film director Hiroshi Teshigahara to direct its first Turandot.

It has been this serene yet intense determinism that has ultimately made Nagano the true visionary opera conductor of our day. I would argue that his four most recent recordings-Busoni's Doktor Faust (from Lyon), Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise (from Salzburg), Peter Eötvös's ravishingly original new opera Three Sisters (which Nagano commissioned and premiered in Lyon in 1988), and Leonard Bernstein's A White House Cantata (the concert version of the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), which Nagano premiered in London in 1999-are the four most necessary operatic recordings of the century's end. Each of these is an extravagant work but in radically different fashions, and it is Nagano's gift to capture that spirit of extravagance-be it spiritual or political; French, Russian, German, or American-by not imposing his own upon it. In that, he becomes that most enigmatic of visionary conductors, one without idiosyncrasy.

Three projects for the second half of 2000 extended Nagano's range even further. At the Salzburg Festival, he led the world premiere of modernist Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's enthusiastically received new opera L'Amour de loin with a libretto by the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, directed by Peter Sellars, and written for Great Gatsby veterans Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (who had to cancel for health reasons), and Dwayne Croft. At the Berlin Festival, Nagano led his new orchestra in an evening of works by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the most visionary German composer since Wagner. At year's end, Nagano premiered in Paris a new nativity oratorio for the millennium, El Niño, by John Adams, the quintessentially American composer with whom Nagano has long been closely associated. It, too, is a Sellars collaboration and was written for Upshaw and Lieberson as soloists.

There is, in fact, a powerful connection between these works. Each is a profound realization that the search for the meaning of our time must look beyond a single culture or tradition. Curious, flexible, questing, practical, a product and student of many traditions, and a musician who prizes polish and precision as entrees into emotion, Nagano, then, becomes our musical guide into the world as we must now know it and accept it.

Mark Swed is the music critic for the Los Angeles Times. His biography of John Cage for Simon & Schuster will be published in 2002.