Kent Nagano had his first in-depth encounter with John Adams’s music in 1980/81 when he was an assistant conductor at the Oakland Symphony, becoming enamored of the audacity, originality, and craft of Common Tones in Simple Time. The now internationally renowned American maestro has since become one of the San Francisco Bay–area composer’s most ardent champions, recording more than a half dozen of Adams’s compositions and presenting the world premieres of such milestone works as The Death of Klinghoffer and El Niño.