By Kyle MacMillan
“Like father, like son.” That old, familiar saying seems especially apt when it comes to Jeffrey Kahane and his son, Gabriel.
Although they lived on opposite coasts for two decades and have different kinds of careers—Jeffrey, 66, following the path of a more traditional classical pianist and Gabriel, 42, finding his way as an entrepreneurial, cross-genre singer-songwriter—both have devoted their lives to music. And both have achieved considerable success in their ways. For now, Jeffrey is probably the more recognizable name of the two, having regular engagements with many of the world’s top orchestras and concert series. Gabriel, meanwhile, has worked with indie-rock newcomer Phoebe Bridgers and folk-rock great Paul Simon, written music for the 2018 Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery, and made his well-received San Francisco Symphony debut in February when the orchestra performed his oratorio on homelessness, emergency shelter intake form.
For the most part, the two have deliberately kept their professional lives separate, performing their first formal concert together in 2011 at the University of Denver and pairing up only a handful of times afterward. But they took their professional collaboration to an unprecedented level in September 2021, when Jeffrey and the Kansas City Symphony premiered Heirloom, a 30-minute concerto for piano and chamber orchestra that Gabriel wrote with his dad in mind. “Heirloom is dedicated with love, admiration, gratitude, and awe to my father, Jeffrey Kahane,” he wrote at the end of his accompanying notes.
In one of the work’s first performances by an ensemble that was not one of its original six co-commissioners, Jeffrey will join guest conductor Teddy Abrams and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in an August 10 performance of Heirloom. Abrams is an admirer of Gabriel’s music, and when he was engaged by Ravinia, he suggested the concerto for the program, and festival leaders readily agreed. After the piece debuted in Kansas City, Gabriel revised it twice, and that third version will be heard here.
It might seem like children growing up around parents who are professional musicians would be preordained to follow in their footsteps. While there are certainly examples in classical music of that succession happening, like pianist Peter Serkin, the son of keyboard great Rudolf Serkin, or conductor Alan Gilbert, son of two former New York Philharmonic musicians, Michael Gilbert and Yoko Takebe, more often, it doesn’t. But in Gabriel’s case, music was so much a part of his childhood that he eased into it naturally.
“I didn’t know anything else,” he said. “It was just normal. Of course, looking back, I realize what a privilege and what an unusual way to grow up it was, traveling around the world when I was little and hearing him [Jeffrey] play so much incredible repertoire with so many incredible musicians.” And it wasn’t all classical music. When Jeffrey was practicing Brahms or Beethoven, it was common for him to take a break and play recording of Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell. “Some kids from classical families grow up with a kind of musical snobbery,” Gabriel said. “I wouldn’t say my dad was totally free of musical snobbery, but it wasn’t snobbery around genre. It was more like the Duke Ellington adage, ‘There’s good music and the other kind.’ ”
“It’s a wonderful kind of tapestry of different musical languages, and I think that is precisely the point, that Gabriel’s musical upbringing was linked that.”
When Gabriel was around 11 or 12, he discovered his parents’ guitars from their early years of playing together in Los Angeles folk-rock bands like Wilderness and The American Revelation, and he figured out how to play simple songs on them. A few years later, Jeffrey introduced him to jazz greats like John Coltrane and Oscar Peterson. So there was what the composer called a “porousness” about what music can be, and Heirloom might embody that more than any other piece he has written.
His dad and mother, a psychologist who sings in the Pasadena (CA) Chorale, a high-level amateur ensemble, didn’t pressure him to study music, and they didn’t even push him to practice when he began piano lessons after first trying the violin. “Which is such an irony,” Jeffrey said, “because there are so many stories of the opposite, where people end up resenting their parents for making them practice and they either lose their love for it or things get all twisted up. And I think he sometimes regrets that we didn’t push him to be more disciplined.” Instead, they let him evolve in his “unusual way,” and Jeffrey said that turned out to be the right decision. “Every project he does, he is always surprising me,” the pianist said, “which is a wonderful thing.”
Along with music, though, Gabriel threw himself into many other pursuits, including baseball and chess, becoming highly ranked in the latter and traveling on a junior competitive circuit. It was only in his last year of high school that he got serious about music and decided to study jazz piano at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. But after a year, he transferred to Brown University in Providence, RI, where he continued to major in music but was able to branch out as well and get heavily involved in theater. He then moved to New York, where he began performing his songs in bars, studying composition and writing for music theater—in short, establishing the kind of unconventional, multifaceted musical life he has continued since.
The origins of Heirloom can be traced as far back as 2009, when the Kahanes performed a short piece together at Lincoln Center, and Jeffrey recalls some early conversations about a piano concerto. The real impetus, though, came from Eric Jacobsen—artistic director and co-founder of The Knights, a boundary-defying chamber orchestra based in New York City—who is friends with Gabriel and kept pushing the idea of the composer writing a concerto for his father. But Gabriel resisted, in part because he had never written a large-scale instrumental work before.
A key turning point came in 2019, when Gabriel served as composer-in-residence at the Grant Park Music Festival in downtown Chicago. On a program that included the composer’s emergency shelter intake form, Jeffrey also was soloist for George Gershwin’s Concerto in F (1925), and he spoke about the work in a pre-concert talk that Gabriel heard. While there are other important American piano concertos, Jeffrey said at the time, Gershwin’s contribution stands alone, because it embraces the European concerto tradition but also speaks in the famed composer’s inimitable jazz-tinged voice. Kahane realized he could do much the same thing, using his songwriting aesthetic, which is rooted in the art-song tradition of Schubert, Mahler, and Ives but is also influenced by more recent voices like Joni Mitchell and Rufus Wainwright, as a musical foundation. “Finally, I said, okay, let’s do this,” he said.
Once Gabriel agreed to write the concerto, it didn’t take much convincing to get six orchestras and organizations to sign on as commissioners because of the appealing circumstances around it. “It’s such a unique thing,” Jeffrey said, “for someone to write a concerto for their father. We tried to think of other instances of that, and I haven’t been able to come up with an example. So there is something very poignant just about the whole idea.” In addition to The Knights and the Kansas City Symphony, the group includes the Oregon Symphony (where Gabriel has served as creative chair since 2018), Aspen Music Festival, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (where Jeffrey was music director 1997–2017) and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
The result is what Gabriel calls an “aural family scrapbook” where each of the three movements is dedicated to different members of his family, including his parents and his eldest daughter (his second daughter was not yet born at the time). “There’s a very beautiful aspect of this piece that is both autobiographical and biographical, and it taps so deeply into all the different strands of shared family history,” Jeffrey said.
The “emotional heart” of this piece is the second movement, My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg, which pays tribute to his paternal German-Jewish grandmother, Hannelore, who managed to flee the Nazis in 1938, ultimately arriving in Los Angeles after stops in Havana and New Orleans. Afterward, there was always uneasy tension around the music and literature of Germany that she still enjoyed and appreciated even as she knew that some of it had been co-opted and tainted by the Nazis, who killed other members of Gabriel and Jeffrey’s extended family.
“In this piece,” Gabriel writes in his program notes, “I ask, How does that complex set of emotions get transmitted across generations? What do we inherit, more broadly, from our forebears? And as a musician caught between two traditions, how do I bring my craft as a songwriter into the more formal setting of the concert hall?”
“I didn’t know anything else. It was just normal, traveling around the world when I was little and hearing Jeffrey play so much incredible repertoire with so many incredible musicians.”
The work is infused with the lyricism of Gabriel’s songwriting voice, Jeffrey said, and its musical language ranges from the pop-tinged opening movement to the unsettled harmonic world of Berg in the second to the fun, bluegrass-influenced third. Along the way are references to Mozart, Brahms, and Ravel. “It sounds like many different things,” Jeffrey said. “It’s a wonderful kind of tapestry of different musical languages, and I think that is precisely the point, that his musical upbringing was like that.”
Gabriel, who moved to Portland in 2020, is finishing a short orchestral opener that the Oregon Symphony is premiering this fall, and he is already set to work on his next big instrumental work, an 18-to-20-minute concerto for Anthony McGill, principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic. “Anthony and I have admired each other for a long time, and he played on a song [“Die Traumdeutung”] on my last album, Magnificent Bird, this clarinet, piano, and voice piece, and I’m really excited to write for him.” The work is part of The Knights’ recently announced multiyear Rhapsody Project, which marks the 2024 centennial of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The chamber orchestra has invited a group of composers to write rhapsodies inspired by the spirit of that iconic work but rethought for today’s musical world.
At the same time, he remains focused on Heirloom, which has generated what Jeffrey called “tremendously enthusiastic” responses from audiences. “I’m sure lots of people are going to play this piece,” he said. Performances in 2023–24 include Gabriel leading a presentation with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and The Knights performing it in May 2024 at Carnegie Hall. “It’s pretty cool,” the composer said. “By the time it gets to New York, it will have 12 or 13 performances.” And if all that isn’t enough, a recording is planned for late 2024 early 2025.
“I’m most comfortable understanding the world and communicating through music and language,” Gabriel said, “but I also feel I have things to say through music alone. There are certain pieces of instrumental music that feel like an urgency for me, and this is definitely one of them. I’m really, really glad this piece is out in the world, and it’s being done a lot.” ■
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.