Pianist, Conductor, Scholar and Teacher

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, Joshua Bell, and Daniel Hope, European tours conducting the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; lectures and performances of Beethoven symphonies informed by his immersion in ancient literature; and collaborations with the Emerson, Miró, Dover, Attacca, and Calidore String Quartets as well as a recently formed trio with violinist Tessa Lark and cellist-singer/songwriter Mike Block.

Kahane is the founding Artistic Director of Harmonium of Texas, a new orchestra and educational initiative based in San Antonio. In its inaugural 2026-27 season, Harmonium of Texas welcomes cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Joshua Bell with soprano Larisa Martínez, and pianist Emanuel Ax. Additional highlights include the Texas premieres of Juan Pablo Contreras's Symphony No. 1, “My Great Dream,” as well as Enrico Chapela's Los Braceros; Tessa Lark performing Michael Torke's bluegrass violin concerto, Sky; a rare performance of Luciano Berio's 1969 masterpiece Sinfonia with Roomful of Teeth; an America at 250–themed concert featuring Aoife O'Donovan and Gabriel Kahane; and a new program supporting the work of young Latino composers. Guest artists also include Inna Faliks, Daniela Liebman, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, and Tommy Mesa.

Highlights of Kahane's recent seasons include his debut at the Colorado Music Festival and return to the Colorado Symphony as guest conductor and soloist; an engagement as piano soloist with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in a performance of his son, composer Gabriel Kahane's, Heirloom (conducted by the composer); and a May 2024 performance of the same concerto at Carnegie Hall with The Knights under the direction of Eric Jacobsen. Kahane has performed the concerto over 20 times to date and recorded it with Eric Jacobsen and The Knights for Nonesuch. Solo appearances include programs with the Oregon Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic, High Desert Chamber Music (Bend, OR), and Northwestern University, where he was featured in a program with Gabriel Kahane.

Kahane served as Music Director of the Sarasota Music Festival for nine seasons, where he significantly expanded the diversity of both the faculty and the programming, often bringing in world-class guest ensembles. He also introduced workshops in improvisation and non-classical musical languages while maintaining a deep commitment to the core canonical repertoire.

During his two decades as Music Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, where he is now Music Director Laureate, Kahane led the orchestra on an East Coast tour, including a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert with bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, as well as an eight-city European tour. He was instrumental in the creation of several new series, including his signature “Discover” concerts, each of which illuminated a major work via a lecture-demonstration and performance. Among his proudest achievements from his LACO tenure was the introduction of the commissioning club, “Sound Investment,” which allows club members to witness and take part in the evolution of a major new work each season, following a composer's process from conception to premiere.

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 composed for him by composers Kevin Puts and Andrew Norman. His son Gabriel's new concerto, Heirloom, which he has now performed many times, was composed for him as a way of tracing the connections between music and three generations of family history. Heirloom was recorded with The Knights under the direction of Eric Jacobsen and released on Nonesuch in late 2025.

Kahane's earliest piano studies, starting at the age of five, 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 émigré 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 longtime 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, the Colorado Symphony for five years, and the newly re-formed San Antonio Philharmonic from 2024 to 2026.

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 United States. 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 and literature, 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. He is fluent in several modern languages and has seriously studied several others.

Kahane teaches a small class of gifted pianists, coaches chamber music, and occasionally teaches academic courses 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, but he waited until they were thirteen to propose. She did not immediately accept, but they were married nine years later. Their daughter Annie is an accomplished choreographer and poet and is currently a professor at California State University at Northridge. Their son Gabriel is a widely acclaimed singer-songwriter-composer and writer. Martha and Jeffrey find endless delight in their two grandchildren, Rosie 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.