Jeffrey Kahane, music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO), is in the middle of his 20th and final season with the orchestra. The pianist and conductor, who is a visiting professor at the Thornton School of Music, will be performing with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and LACO on Sunday. I recently spoke with Kahane about his career with LACO and the upcoming concert. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Brian Marks: On this upcoming program that you're going to be doing, you have two pieces by Haydn, and two by Brahms. What is your relationship to those two composers?
Jeffrey Kahane: Well, it's always hard to describe what one's relationship is to a composer. It's kind of like saying "What's your relationship like with a person?" Because they are people to me. One of the things that's really interesting about living with classical music is that composers—even though they have been dead a hundred years, or in the case of Haydn, 200 years, they become like friends to you. You get to know them, and the more of their music you know the more you come to understand their personalities, their range of experiences that they express. Haydn is a composer whom I cherish. He was a composer who managed to combine the most incredibly evolved skill as a composer with tremendous humor and fire and often great tenderness as well. He's known a lot for his wit and his humor. He's one of the composers that can really make you laugh. But that's just one side of his personality—he had many different aspects to his personality. But I love the balance in his music, between this amazing sense of compositional skill and mastery and his humanity. I think of all the great composers—people say, if you could have dinner with any of the great composers, who would you really like to get to know? And I wouldn't say he's number one, but he would be a lot of fun to hang around. He was known as a practical joker. He was expelled from school for cutting off the pigtails of the person sitting at the desk in front of him. He had a really wonderful sense of vitality and humor, but at the same time a lot of passion.
Brahms is one of those composers that I think if you talk to most musicians, they will just kind of light up because he has such amazing warmth. His music is some of the warmest and most generous music. He writes the most beautiful melodies. But like Haydn, he was also an amazing master of the art of composition and was able to do things from a technical point of view that were extraordinary. But they seldom are in the forefront—what you're always aware of with Brahms is the sheer beauty of the harmonies and the melodies. It's very communicative music, very deeply human. It's extremely romantic and at the same time very discipline.
One of the things I love about this program is that we're starting with a piece by Haydn, then we're doing a piece by Brahms, and then we're doing a piece by Brahms which is based on a theme by Haydn. So he took this famous chorale melody that Haydn composed and wrote a set of variations on it. And then we're finishing again with Haydn. So it's a very symmetrical program.
BM: Yo-Yo Ma is going to be playing on two of those pieces. You've recorded with him before—what's it like working with a musician of his caliber?
JK: Working with Yo-Yo is always a thrill, not only because he's a great musician and a great cellist, but because he's a great human being. Like Haydn, he has a great sense of humor. He's a very funny person and also a very serious person. He's someone who has made such a difference in the world of music. His life has been very much about giving to people, and anyone who's ever had anything to do with him is always amazed that someone who is as famous as he is makes everyone around him feel like they're important to—which is not something that all famous people do.
We've worked together a lot. We've toured together every year for at least a week or two for probably eight or nine years. That was a long time ago, but we've worked together at intervals off and on since that time. So we know one another really well, it's a very comfortable feeling for me. And he's just very special. You know, a lot of people who have that superstar reputation or carry that mantle—they can be very difficult to be around because they're very conscious of it. They don't go out of their way to make people comfortable. Yo-Yo is exactly the opposite.
BM: You have been with LACO for 20 years. Can you tell me a bit about that organization?
JK: Well, it's one of the great chamber orchestras in the country, no question about it. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. It's an orchestra that has an interesting history. As you probably know, Los Angeles has a great musical tradition going back to the late 1930s when a lot of the best musicians in the world came here fleeing from the conflict in Europe. So starting in the '30s and '40s, there was this flood of musical talent. They came from Germany, from Poland, from Russia, from so many different places. A number of them ended up playing in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And a lot of them also ended up playing in the film studios, where they played some of the great film scores, because in those years movie studios also attracted some very great composers who wrote scores for some of the most famous films ever made.
What happened was, over time back in the '60s, a lot of those musicians who were playing in the studios wanted to do something besides playing film scores or television scores, and someone had the idea of founding a chamber orchestra and making it possible for musicians who were not in the Philharmonic but on that level to have an outlet. So the chamber orchestra was founded in 1968 and it immediately became a very important part of the musical life of Los Angeles because it was offering some very different from the Philharmonic. Not better, just different. It very quickly became an internationally recognized orchestra and toured in Japan and Europe and around the country.
At this point it's at an amazing juncture. I'm going to be leaving and they're going to be hiring the sixth music director who will take over. It's really one of the great orchestras of its kind in America. It's a remarkable group of people. There's a tremendous sense of camaraderie among the musicians. There are even a few musicians left who were there at the very beginning when the orchestra started.
BM: What are you most proud of with the orchestra in your 20 years there?
JK: I think there are few things. One is just the fact that I'm leaving with the morale of the orchestra being incredibly high. I think if you talk to the musicians, they are really happy about being part of the orchestra. They have, I believe, a very optimistic sense about the orchestra's future. The orchestra is on very solid financial ground right now, which I can't claim responsibility for that completely, or even mostly, because I don't manage the money. But if the orchestra were not perceived as something really exceptional and successful, we wouldn't be attracting the kind of support we have. And I'm especially proud of the record that we have in terms of performing and commissioning new music. We've done something like 50 premieres in the time that I've been music director. Not all of them world premieres, but a number of those were works we commissioned or co-commissioned. We've also done a lot of premieres that were Los Angeles or West Coast premieres. I think as a proportion—given the size or our organization, which is relatively small—the proportion of new music that we have either commissioned or championed is remarkably high, and I'm really proud of that.
BM: You're a professor here at the Thornton School of Music. What drew you to teaching, on top of performing and conducting?
JK: Well I was a professor of piano 20 years ago at the Eastman School of Music. I started teaching at Eastman in 1988 and I was there for seven years. By the time I left there, that was exactly at the time when my career as a conductor was starting to take off, in addition to my piano career. And for a long time I just didn't have time to do it, but it's also been something I have loved. I loved sharing knowledge, I love helping younger musicians to grow and succeed. It's just part of who I am, the desire to educate.
Kahane performs with Yo-Yo Ma and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on Sunday, October 16 in Bovard Auditorium. Tickets are available here.
Reach Staff Reporter Brian Marks here.
Annenberg Media