Ravinia 2023 Issue 4

“ It’s a wonderful kind of tapestry of different musical languages, and I think that is precisely the point, that Gabriel’s musical upbringing was like that. ” –JEFFREYKAHANE E.F. MARTON It might seem like children growing up around parents who are professional musicians would be pre- ordained to follow in their footsteps. While there are certainly examples in classical music of that succession happening, like pianist Peter Serkin, the son of keyboard great Rudolf Ser- kin, or conductor Alan Gilbert, son of two former New York Philharmonic musicians, Michael Gilbert and Yoko Takebe, more often, it doesn’t. But in Gabriel’s case, music was so much a part of his childhood that he eased into it naturally. “I didn’t know anything else,” he said. “It was just normal. Of course, looking back, I realize what a priv- ilege and what an unusual way to grow up it was, traveling around the world when I was little and hearing him [Jeffrey] play so much incredible repertoire with so many incredible musicians.” And it wasn’t all classical music. When Jeffrey was practicing Brahms or Beethoven, it was com- mon for him to take a break and play recording of Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell. “Some kids from classi- cal families grow up with a kind of musical snobbery,” Gabriel said. “I wouldn’t say my dad was totally free of musical snobbery, but it wasn’t snobbery around genre. It was more like the Duke Ellington adage, ‘There’s good music and the other kind.’ ” When Gabriel was around 11 or 12, he discovered his parents’ guitars from their early years of playing to- gether in Los Angeles folk-rock bands like Wilderness and The American Revelation, and he figured out how to play simple songs on them. A few years later, Jeffrey introduced him to jazz greats like John Coltrane and Oscar Peterson. So there was what the composer called a “porousness” about what music can be, and Heirloom might embody that more than any other piece he has written. His dad and mother, a psychol- ogist who sings in the Pasadena (CA) Chorale, a high-level amateur ensemble, didn’t pressure him to study music, and they didn’t even push him to practice when he began piano lessons after first trying the violin. “Which is such an irony,” Jeffrey said, “because there are so many stories of the opposite, where people end up resenting their parents for mak- ing them practice and they either lose their love for it or things get all twisted up. And I think he sometimes regrets that we didn’t push him to be more disciplined.” Instead, they let him evolve in his “unusual way,” and Jeffrey said that turned out to be the right decision. “Every project he does, he is always surprising me,” the pianist said, “which is a wonderful thing.” Along with music, though, Gabriel threw himself into many other pur- suits, including baseball and chess, becoming highly ranked in the latter and traveling on a junior competitive circuit. It was only in his last year of high school that he got serious about music and decided to study jazz piano at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. But after a year, he transferred to Brown University in Providence, RI, where he continued to major in music but was able to branch out as well and get heavily involved in theater. He then moved to New York, where he began performing his songs in bars, studying composition and writing for music theater—in short, establishing the kind of unconven- tional, multifaceted musical life he has continued since. The origins of Heirloom can be traced as far back as 2009, when the Kahanes performed a short piece together at Lincoln Center, and Jeffrey recalls some early conversations about a piano concerto. The real impetus, though, came from Eric Jacobsen— artistic director and co-founder of The Knights, a boundary-defying chamber orchestra based in New York City—who is friends with Gabriel and kept pushing the idea of the composer writing a concerto for his father. But Gabriel resisted, in part because he had never written a large-scale instru- mental work before. A key turning point came in 2019, when Gabriel served as compos- er-in-residence at the Grant Park Music Festival in downtown Chicago. On a program that included the com- poser’s emergency shelter intake form , Jeffrey also was soloist for George Gershwin’s Concerto in F (1925), and he spoke about the work in a pre-con- cert talk that Gabriel heard. While there are other important American piano concertos, Jeffrey said at the time, Gershwin’s contribution stands alone, because it embraces the Europe- an concerto tradition but also speaks in the famed composer’s inimitable jazz-tinged voice. Kahane realized he could do much the same thing, using his songwriting aesthetic, which is rooted in the art-song tradition of Schubert, Mahler, and Ives but is also influenced by more recent voices like RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 31 – AUGUST 14, 2023 16