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Given the impact of his career upon music, it seems incredible that Kent Nagano almost became a lawyer. Nagano has proven himself a powerhouse in the operatic and orchestral realms, championing the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is best known for his long association with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Opéra National de Lyon, and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, as well as a critically acclaimed recording career.

Nagano was born in Berkeley, California, on November 22, 1951. Despite thorough musical training beginning at age six and obvious talent, Nagano simultaneously worked toward degrees at the University of California, Santa Cruz in sociology and music in 1974 before moving on to San Francisco State University in 1976 to study law. There, composition courses with Grosvenor Cooper and Roger Nixon turned him toward music, and an encounter with Laszlo Varga -- former first cellist of the New York Philharmonic under Walter, Mitropoulos, and Bernstein -- prompted him toward conducting. Though he no longer composes, Nagano has said, "While I seemed to be quite able from the point of view of craftsmanship, I was not very good at the creative aspects! However, having the skills of composition only increases the admiration that one can have for the exceptionally talented who have composed great works." His apprenticeship was spent under Sarah Caldwell at the Opera Company of Boston from 1977 to 1979, where he eventually became an assistant conductor.

In 1978, Nagano was named music director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, a post he held until 2009. It was with the Berkeley Symphony in 1982 where he led the first American performance of Pfitzner's opera Palestrina. As assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he stood in, without rehearsal, to conduct Mahler's Symphony No. 9 in 1984. An adventurous spirit and a major interpretive grasp were clearly at work. These traits were confirmed when Olivier Messiaen tapped Nagano to assist Seiji Ozawa in preparing the world premiere of his sprawling, luminous opera Saint François d'Assise in 1984, a work Nagano later recorded. His years as musical director of the Opéra National de Lyon (1988 to 1998) were marked by a number of distinguished premieres (including Peter Eötvös' opera Three Sisters, which he commissioned) and recordings, including Debussy's abandoned opera Rodrigue et Chimène, John Adams' Death of Klinghoffer, Busoni's comic opera double bill of Arlecchino and Turandot, and his testament, the unfinished Doktor Faust (with alternate completions by Philipp Jarnach and Antony Beaumont). As music director of the Hallé Orchestra from 1991 until 2000, he recorded John Adams' El Niño and the four-act version of Britten's Billy Budd.

Nagano was named the principal conductor and music director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin in 2000. The following year, he took up the role of principal conductor of the Los Angeles Opera and transitioned to become the company's first-ever music director in 2003. In 2006, Nagano stepped down from his positions with the Los Angeles Opera and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester to take up the post of music director for both the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the Bavarian State Opera. He still maintains a relationship with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, whose members named him Honorary Conductor. He exited his Bavarian State Opera at the end of his contract in 2013, taking up the general music director and chief conductor posts for the Hamburg State Opera in 2015, with a contract extension through 2025. Nagano left the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in 2020, which named him conductor emeritus in 2021.

Nagano is married to pianist Mari Kodama, and together they issued a complete recording of Beethoven's works for piano and orchestra. ~ Adrian Corleonis & Keith Finke

The voluptuous Sophia Loren was among the most successful international stars of the postwar era -- not only did she rise to fame as a sex symbol, but she also won a measure of critical acclaim rarely afforded most of her foreign-born contemporaries. Born Sofia Scicolone in Rome on September 20, 1934, she and her single mother lived in abject poverty in the war-torn slums of Naples; at the age of 14 she began entering area beauty contests, later becoming a model and appearing in a number of uncredited bit parts in films. After winning a beauty contest in Rome, Loren was signed to a film contract by producer Carlo Ponti, who began grooming her for stardom by recruiting drama coaches and casting her in small movie roles, including an appearance in the 1951 smash Anna, under the name "Sofia Lazzaro." For 1952's La Favorita, her first larger role, Ponti changed her name to Sophia Loren, and with the following year's La Tratta Delle Bianche she earned third billing after Silvana Pampanini and Eleanora Rossi-Drago.

By the mid-'50s, Loren was a star in Italy as well as a major sex symbol, but with the exception of 1955's Attila Flagello di Dio, co-starring Anthony Quinn, few of her pictures were distributed internationally. That changed with Vittorio de Sica's L' Oro di Napoli, which was recut and dubbed for foreign sale, resulting in poor reviews; Loren, however, was singled out for the strength of her performance as a Neapolitan shopkeeper, surprising many critics who had dismissed her as merely another bombshell. As a result, 1955's La Donna del Fiume was distributed in both the U.S. and Britain, as were a number of other subsequent projects. Eventually, Loren emerged as an international star, and Ponti soon declared her ready for Hollywood; she moved tentatively into the English-language market with a pair of films shot in Europe, 1957's Boy on a Dolphin (in which she appeared opposite Alan Ladd) and The Pride and the Passion (starring Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant).

In 1957, Loren and Ponti were wed in Mexico; their marriage was a national scandal in Italy because Ponti had already been married once before, and a series of legal complications ensued -- one prominent Italian Catholic magazine even instructed readers to boycott her movies. In the meantime, Ponti orchestrated with Paramount a four-film contract for Loren's services, beginning with 1958's Desire Under the Elms. In Hollywood, her acting skills blossomed, and she won Best Actress honors at the 1959 Venice Film Festival for her work in Martin Ritt's drama The Black Orchid. However, she proved unable to draw audiences, a situation which her next film, George Cukor's idiosyncratic Western Heller in Pink Tights, failed to remedy. 1960's romantic comedy It Started in Naples, with Clark Gable, was Loren's commercial breakthrough, but Paramount had lost faith in her star power and cut her loose; she next traveled to Britain to film Anthony Asquith's The Millionairess.

Upon returning to Italy, Loren reunited with de Sica in 1961's La Ciociara, a wartime drama in which she starred as a widowed mother caught in a love triangle with her teen daughter (Eleanora Brown) and Jean-Paul Belmondo; containing by a brutal rape scene, the film won widespread acclaim, and Loren's gut-wrenching performance earned her an Academy Award, the first foreign-language performer to win the Best Actress prize; she was also so honored at the Cannes Film Festival. She next shot 1961's El Cid in Spain with Charlton Heston, followed by the de Sica episode of the anthology Boccaccio '70. On the strength of her Oscar win, she also returned to English-language fare with 1963's Five Miles to Midnight, followed a year later by The Fall of the Roman Empire; again her success was minimal, and she went back to the relative comforts of the Italian film industry for Ieri, Oggi, Domani and Matrimonio all'Italiana, both directed by de Sica and both co-starring Marcello Mastroianni.

In 1965, Ponti signed a production deal with MGM; a small role for Loren in Operation Crossbow and a larger part in Lady L were the results, followed by a series of films which cast her variously as a Jewish wife (1966's Judith), an Arab mistress (1966's Arabesque), and a former Russian prostitute (A Countess from Hong Kong). None of these projects were well-received, however, and after the failure of the fairy tale C'era una Volta and Questi Fantasmi, the Ponti/MGM deal ended unceremoniously. Despite her recent lack of success, Loren nevertheless remained a major talent, and in 1969 she even won a Golden Globe award as the world's most popular female star. Still, her popularity was not reflected by her box office totals; projects like de Sica's 1970 picture I Girasoli and 1971's La Moglie del Prete performed well in Italy, but played disastrously virtually everywhere else. Another return to Hollywood to appear in the musical The Man of La Mancha was also met with an icy reception.

Loren spent the majority of the mid-'70s exclusively in Italy, starring in de Sica's Il Viaggio and reuniting with Mastroianni in 1975's La Pupa del Gangster. When a dubbed version of 1977's Una Giornata Particolare found favor with American audiences, Hollywood again came calling, resulting in a pair of thrillers, 1978's The Brass Target and the next year's Firepower. Also in 1979, Loren penned her autobiography, Sophia Living and Loving: Her Own Story, and in 1980 played herself in a TV-movie based on the book. She did not reappear before the cameras for another four years, instead writing a beauty book and launching a perfume named in her honor; in the wake of 1984's Qualcosa di Biondo she appeared onscreen rarely, teaming with Mastroianni one last time in Robert Altman's 1994 film Ready to Wear (Pret-a-Porter) and making a successful return to Hollywood filmmaking with the 1996 hit comedy Grumpier Old Men. In honor of her lengthy career, Loren was also the recipient of a special Oscar in 1991. ~ Jason Ankeny

The first independent orchestra in Russia since Czarist days, the Russian National Orchestra has maintained a high international profile. In 2004, it became the first Russian orchestra to win a Grammy award.

The Russian National Orchestra was founded in 1990 during the period of perestroika or openness that preceded the fall of the Soviet Union. All other orchestras in the country since the advent of Communism had been state-owned. The orchestra's founder was pianist and conductor Mikhail Pletnev, who conducted the group in its early years. He offered players an atmosphere of artistic freedom and an actual financial stake in the orchestra, and top players began to flock to the group from state ensembles. The orchestra was successful from the beginning, and it attracted financial support from corporations and foundations both within and outside Russia. Violinist and conductor Vladimir Spivakov became the group's music director in 1999; Pletnev has remained active with the orchestra, and it has a large roster of guest conductors. The Russian National Orchestra often appears at its home base, the Zaryadye Concert Hall in Moscow, but it is notable for the depth and frequency of its international touring. The orchestra was the first Russian group to appear at the Vatican, and it toured Israel. The orchestra has made multiple tours of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and it has appeared at the BBC Proms in London and other major festivals. It has been heard on broadcasts on both Russia's Kultura program and National Public Radio in the U.S. The Russian National Orchestra maintains two foundations, Cultural Allies sponsors exchanges between Russia and the U.S., while Magic of Music organizes concerts in Russian orphanages.

The Russian National Orchestra is especially notable for its recording career, which began just a year after the group's founding in 1991, with a critically acclaimed performance of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74 ("Pathétique"). The orchestra signed with the Deutsche Grammophon label in 1993 and remained there until 2009, issuing mostly, but not exclusively, Russian music; Pletnev led the orchestra in a complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies released in 2007. In the 2010s, the orchestra has recorded mostly for PentaTone Classics, issuing a half-dozen albums or more in several years. A 2003 recording of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf featured speaking parts from former U.S. president Bill Clinton and former Soviet prime minister Mikhail Gorbachev; the record earned a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for Children and spawned several remakes in other countries. As of 2020, when the orchestra released a recording of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 ("Babi Yar") under conductor Kirill Karabits, the orchestra's recording catalog comprised well over 50 albums. ~ James Manheim