Gabriel Kahane

Writing and performing music that moves effortlessly from dense modernism to spare vernacular song, pianist, composer, and singer Gabriel Kahane has established himself as a leading voice among a generation of young composers redefining music for the 21st century. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times for “an all around dazzling performance” in his debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic earlier this year (in the premiere of his song cycle Orinoco Sketches, conducted by John Adams), Mr. Kahane moves with ease as a performer between musical realms.

Performance highlights of the 2010-11 season included sold out concerts with artists as varied as Chris Thile and Brad Mehldau, the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, as well as with his father, the noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane, with whom he collaborated on a critically acclaimed duo recital at Denver’s Newman Center for the Arts. In addition, Kahane commissioned ten songs from ten composers, including Timo Andres, Ted Hearne, and Andrew Norman, for a solo recital presented by the MATA Festival, juxtaposed with a performance of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, for which Kahane accompanied himself at the piano.

Gabriel has performed and/or recorded with Sufjan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright, Punch Brothers, and Audra McDonald, who has incorporated his songs into her repertoire.The fall of 2011 also witnesses the release of Where Are the Arms, Kahane’s second full album as a recording artist. Where Are the Arms picks up where Mr. Kahane’s self-titled debut left off, refining the relationship between music and text while further marrying intricate chamber arrangements to intimate narrative-driven songs, anchored by Kahane’s voice, described by Alex Ross of the New Yorker as “sonorous, mesmerizing”.

This summer, Gabriel serves as composer-in-residence at the Bravo Vail Valley Chamber Music Festival, where he will remount his critically acclaimed Lincoln Center American Songbook debut supported by an ensemble of eleven musicians, including the Calder Quartet, with whom he will premiere a new song cycle for voice and string quartet. Additional summer activities include recitals at Aspen and Caramoor, as well as a residency at Rockwood Music Hall in New York City.

Launched by his 2006 song cycle Craigslistlieder—heard from Vancouver to Virginia, by Mr Kahane and lieder singers alike—Kahane’s rapid ascent as a composer of concert works continues to bloom in the 2011-2012 season, with the premiere of a large concerto-like song cycle slated for Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall in March with Kahane as soloist alongside the American Composers Orchestra. Additional performances of the work will be heard with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as at the Savannah Music Festival. Little Sleep's Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, a cello sonata-cum-song cycle written for Alisa Weilerstein, will be heard in a concert for Lincoln Center's Chamber Music Society with the composer as pianist and singer. A string quartet, The Red Book, written for the Kronos Quartet, will be premiered in the fall.

Through a Music Alive grant with Meet-the-Composer, Gabriel will serve as composer-in-residence for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra from 2011 to 2013. One of the most sought after theater composers of his generation, Kahane wrote music and lyrics for February House, which will enjoy back to back productions in 2012, first at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven before arriving at the Public Theater, which commissioned the work, for its New York premiere in the spring of 2012. The musical, with a book by Seth Bockley, chronicles the unlikely housing of a coterie of artists-- including W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee-- within the walls of a single dilapidated Victorian mansion in Brooklyn Heights during World War II. Gabriel has also received theatrical commissions from the Signature Theater in Arlington VA and the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. A 2010 MacDowell Colony fellow, Kahane makes his home in Brooklyn, New York, in close company with a century-old piano and many books.