Jeffrey Kahane

Conductor | Pianist | Educator

San Antonio Philharmonic Debuts New Home

“Music director Jeffrey Kahane was in charge of a program that began with a brief but enticing piece by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ a Tate, a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. The closer was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in a performance of blazing power and momentum. In between, the Russian-American pianist Natasha Paremski was the first-class soloist in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

“Jeffrey Kahane is proving to be a conductor of the first rank. His account of the Shostakovich was compelling from first to last. He forged a totally unified structural arch, and he elicited pointed details from the orchestra. Perhaps most memorable was the second movement, an allegro that Kahane drove into presto territory. The orchestra gave that music a sharp edge of slashing anger, surely reflecting the Soviet-period composer’s torment under Stalin’s soul-crushing reign. Special notice goes to principal oboe Joshua Bullock and English horn Erin Mallard for beautiful solo work. The strings were in splendid shape. Seating was a little unusual –(from left to right) first violins with the basses behind them, cellos, violas, second violins.

“Tate composed “Chokfi'” for the strings and percussion of a youth orchestra. The title is the Chickasaw word for “rabbit,” a trickster figure in some indigenous cultures of the American southwest. Its compact eight minutes are propelled by aptly tricky percussion rhythms that professionals can’t coast through, and its lyrical writing for strings demands silken playing. The performance was top-drawer.”

Read the complete review at Incident Light here

Scottish Rite Cathedral exterior, San Antonio, Texas

The Scottish Rite Cathedral – 308 Ave E , San Antonio, Texas

About Jeffrey

“Over the years, I have tried my best to bring a sense of moral and ethical purpose to everything I do as a musician, and to transmit the sense that we are not just making beautiful sounds, but engaging in storytelling, in acts of imagination and ethical choices.”

Celebrated for his “imagination, devotion and supreme musicianship” (Los Angeles Times), Jeffrey Kahane is now in the fifth decade of an expansive and eclectic musical career. As a pianist, conductor and scholar, his career highlights run the gamut from concertos with the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony, to recitals with Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell, European tours at the podium of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, lecture/performances of Beethoven symphonies informed by his immersion in ancient literature, and collaborations with the Emerson, Miró, Dover, Attacca and Calidore String Quartets. Kahane is currently Music Director of the San Antonio Philharmonic and leads his first titled season in 2024-2025. Since 2017 he has also served as Music Director of the Sarasota Music Festival, where he has significantly expanded the diversity of both the faculty and the programming, introducing workshops in improvisation and non-classical musical languages, while maintaining a deep commitment to the core canonical repertoire.

During the 2024-2025 season, Kahane conducts the San Antonio Philharmonic in more than a dozen performances, including concerts featuring piano soloists Jon Kimura Parker, Nicolas Namoradze, Natasha Paremski and Illia Ovcharenko. In a special series of concerts at San Antonio’s Stable Hall, Bach: Reflections & Reverberations, Kahane and the San Antonio Philharmonic will be joined by the GRAMMY®-winning vocal band Roomful of Teeth, an artistic partner to the orchestra, as well as the San Antonio Chamber Choir and the Children’s Chorus of San Antonio. Kahane also performs as a piano soloist in programs with the Oregon Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic, High Desert Chamber Music (Bend, OR) and Northwestern University, where he is featured in a program with his son, composer Gabriel Kahane. From May 31 through June 22, 2025, he leads the Sarasota Music Festival as Music Director…

San Antonio Philharmonic

The San Antonio Philharmonic announced the appointment of beloved conductor, pianist, and educator Jeffrey Kahane as Music Director for the 2024-2025 season in February 2024, for an initial period of three seasons.

San Antonio Philharmonic Executive Director Roberto Treviño, an architect and former city councilman, said of Kahane’s appointment, “The San Antonio Philharmonic’s dedication to inclusivity across all segments of our community is underscored with the selection of Jeffrey Kahane, who understands the significance of engaging with all members of the community.”

2024-2025 marks the third season of the Philharmonic, revived by its musicians with the help of dedicated community leaders and supporters. This season celebrates an 85-year musical legacy and a new era of commitment to the San Antonio community, including partnerships with Majestic Theatre, San Antonio Mastersingers, and many others. The Philharmonic will welcome soloists Augustin Hadelich, Elena Urioste, Jon Kimura Parker and a two-season artistic partnership with Roomful of Teeth.

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USC Thornton School of Music

Jeffrey was appointed to the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California in 2016. He teaches a highly select group of outstanding pianists, as well as coaching chamber music and teaching courses in performance practice. In 2021, he co-taught a course which he developed with colleagues from the Department of Classics, on the connections between ancient Greek and Roman literature and the history of classical music. He has also taken numerous courses in the USC Classics department allowing him to pursue his passion for studying Greek and Latin literature in the original languages. Jeffrey previously taught at the New England Conservatory, the Eastman School of Music, and in 2012-13 was Professor of Music and the Humanities at Bard College.

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Jeffrey Kahane plays a grand piano with an orchestra

Sarasota Music Festival

Every summer, for three weeks in June, the Sarasota Music Festival brings together over 100 musicians – some sixty fellows and forty-five faculty artists – from around the country and the world for a celebration of music that over the course of nearly sixty years has developed a reputation as one of the great music festivals in America.

In 2016, Jeffrey was appointed the third music director of the Festival, succeeding the legendary Robert Levin and the founder of the Festival, Paul Wolfe. Since his appointment, Jeffrey has expanded the range of the Festival repertoire as well as introducing dozens of new faculty artists in addition to many of the long-term faculty, some of whom have been coming to teach and play for decades and who in several cases began their association with the Festival as fellows themselves in their student years.

This coming summer, the Sarasota Music Festival will run from June 2nd to June 22th, 2024 and will have a special focus on musicians who speak multiple musical languages and are at home in a variety of musical genres, with opportunities for the fellows to broaden their musical horizons beyond the traditional canonical repertoire and their classical training.

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