About Jeffrey

In addition to the dozens of works commissioned or premiered by the orchestras where he has served as music director, Kahane has premiered piano concertos written for him by composers Kevin Puts and Andrew Norman. His son Gabriel’s new concerto Heirloom, which he has performed several times, was written for him as a way of tracing the connections between music and three generations of family history.

Kahane’s earliest piano studies, starting at the age of 5, were with Howard Weisel, who encouraged a love of improvisation that abides to this day. One of the watershed moments in his early musical life was hearing Joni Mitchell’s first album, Song to a Seagull, at age 12, not long after he started teaching himself to play the guitar. (At one time, he considered becoming a singer-songwriter.) At the age of 14, he was given the opportunity to study privately with the great Polish emigré pianist Jakob Gimpel, whose teaching profoundly shaped his understanding of music’s essence and purpose.

He left home at 16 to study at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where his teachers included Mack McCray, Paul Hersh and John Adams, of whose music he has been a devoted advocate for decades. After graduating, he served for three summers as rehearsal pianist for Robert Shaw’s Festival of Masses in San Francisco, an experience that intensified his understanding of music as ethical practice, which Shaw personified in the highest degree. These summers inspired a love of choral repertoire that would be deepened by his long-time involvement with Helmuth Rilling and the Oregon Bach Festival.

After private studies with John Perry, Kahane went on to be a finalist in the 1981 Van Cliburn Competition, and his piano career took off after his Grand Prize win at the Arthur Rubinstein International Competition in 1983. He took with him the conviction that music can speak to shared values and aspirations, and to the most burning issues of our time. A few years later, spurred by the conviction that orchestras can and should be instruments of community, he began conducting, beginning with a stint at the Oregon Bach Festival. He later served as Music Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for 20 years, the Santa Rosa Symphony for 11 years, and the Colorado Symphony for five years.

As a capstone to his final season as music director of LACO, Kahane curated a three-week festival, “Lift Every Voice,” to celebrate the parallel achievements of composer Kurt Weill and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who both fled Nazi Germany and became champions of the cause of civil rights in the US. The festival opened with a free concert of choral music at one of Southern California’s largest Black churches, where members of LACO played side-by-side with the Los Angeles Inner City Youth Orchestra. The choirs for the concert came from a church, a university, a synagogue and a Muslim elementary school. Among the festival’s other offerings, Kahane conducted Bruce Adolphe’s new violin concerto, I Will Not Remain Silent, which was composed in part as a tribute to Rabbi Prinz, and led the first Los Angeles performances in 67 years of Kurt Weill’s 1949 Broadway opera about apartheid, Lost in the Stars.

Continuing his pursuit of a lifelong passion for the study of languages, Kahane went back to school in 2009 to study ancient Greek and Latin, earning a Master’s degree in Classics in 2011 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Classics at the University of Southern California.

When not on the road, he teaches a small class of gifted pianists and coaches chamber music at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, and occasionally guest conducts the USC Thornton Symphony. In cooperation with the USC Classics department, he recently developed and co-taught a general education course for undergraduates exploring the connections between classical music and ancient classical literature.

Kahane and his wife Martha (a psychologist, choral singer and writer) met at summer camp at age ten. Their daughter Annie is an accomplished choreographer-dancer-poet, while their son Gabriel is a widely acclaimed singer-songwriter-composer. They find great delight in their two grandchildren, Vera and Agnes. Beyond his musical pursuits, Kahane is a devoted reader, hiker and practitioner of yoga and meditation. He is perpetually refining his recipe for linguine with clam sauce, which has received glowing reviews from his family and a few close friends.