Talking with father-son musicians Jeffrey and Gabriel Kahane is a bit like eavesdropping on a meeting of a mutual admiration society. So it’s no surprise that one of the highlights of the 61st annual Sarasota Music Festival, running June 1-21, will be a collaboration between the two. 

The elder Kahane (Jeffrey) has been music director of the festival since 2016. This year, he’ll perform Heirloom, a concerto for piano and orchestra, at a June 20 concert at the Sarasota Opera House, and Gabriel will act as conductor. (Yes, the performance is taking place five days after Father’s Day.) Although it will be the first time the work has been performed in Sarasota, it’s far from the first time out. “It would maybe be the 20th time,” says Gabriel, a singer-songwriter with several albums to his credit. “It was actually commissioned by a consortium of six orchestras and premiered in 2021 in Kansas City. A dear friend of mine, Eric Jacobsen [music director of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra] had been hounding me for years to write a concerto for my dad. He’s a big admirer of my father’s. He would jokingly refer to it as my ‘pops’ concerto.”

The thematic content of the work, Gabriel says, “is, unsurprisingly, to do with my father, thinking of inheritance—hence the title. Each of the three movements is preoccupied with an inheritance. The first, ‘Guitars in the Attic,’ is a reference to the folk music I heard and that my parents played together, along with the guitars I found in the attic when I was an adolescent. The second movement is an investigation of generational memory. My dad’s mom fled Germany in 1939 and wrote in her diaries of her deep love for German literature and music and how all that was appropriated by the Nazi regime. And the third movement, ‘Vera’s Chicken-Powered Transit Machine,’ ponders the mystery of what we pass down to our children. I was a new father when I wrote the piece, sort of marooned in Portland, Oregon, during the pandemic, and in the absence of toys for my daughter, Vera, I turned a diaper box into a car.”

 

 

 

 

 

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Gabriel says it’s been “a great pleasure to work on Heirloom with my dad. He’s one of my favorite musicians. In Sarasota I’m conducting the piece, which is a newer chapter for me in my creative life. I started out to become a singer-songwriter, writing vocal music. A lot of the instrumental music I have written is an attempt to reconcile these two sides of my creative life”—a process he says earlier composers like Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin have also gone through.

“My recollection is that I actually asked Gabe to write a concerto for me at some point,” says Jeffrey. His son initially resisted, Gabriel says, because he did not want the perception of “me riding my father’s coattails. What changed my mind was when The New Yorker blurbed a concert of his with the words, ‘Jeffrey Kahane, the father of Gabriel Kahane.’ After that, we thought it was OK.”

Jeffrey says that Heirloom fits well into the overall theme of this year’s festival, “Music as a Mirror of History.”

“Not every single work was chosen because of the theme,” he says, “but there are definitely works and pairings that give the audience the opportunity to reflect that music allows us to have a direct contact with history, with ages and people past, in a way that no other art form does. It’s such a physical experience.”

One example: Jeffrey chose two works by Richard Strauss to be played during the festival. The first, written when Strauss was 18, is “quintessentially romantic, coming from a world of complete innocence,” says Kahane. “The other, Metamorphosen, written at the end of Strauss’ life, centers on the devastation of German culture and reflects the total loss of that innocence” after World War II.

Aside from this year’s concerts, Jeffrey adds that the festival, with its long history of bringing in top artists to teach talented young students, has a “whole new crop of amazingly wonderful faculty and, of course, fellows. I’m thrilled by the fact that we have lots of new people coming to teach, some of whom are alums.”

For complete info about and tickets to this year’s festival, visit sarasotaorchestra.org/festival.