Kahane: A Champion of the Composer

One of the many advantages in being a prizewinner at a major international competition, says Jeffrey Kahane--who returns to Hollywood Bowl on Thursday to play Mozart with conductor Edo de Waart and the Los Angeles Philharmonic--is “the luxury it affords an artist to be able to delve into parts of the repertory that were formerly too risky.”

The 31-year-old Kahane, who in 1983, after strong secondary showings in showcase competitions here and abroad, took first prize in the Artur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Israel, refers specifically to his present ability, as a marketable concert artist, to place on his programs new contemporary and even controversial works from this century without threatening his marketability. With prizes comes clout, he says.

It is a position he enjoys, because “I like the freedom to investigate music that interests me.”

Making an informal list of living composers who produce such music, Kahane mentions first a contemporary of his, Kenneth Frazelle, the 33-year-old composer the pianist first met during his single year as a student at Juilliard, in 1975-76 (he completed his training at the San Francisco Conservatory).

“His work is something extraordinary--and not easy to describe,” Kahane said, during a phone interview from his home in Boston.

Frazelle, whose “Blue Ridge Airs” Kahane introduced at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., in May, is no trend-follower, his fan and friend claims.

“Although Frazelle has been influenced by (Roger) Sessions, with whom he studied, he has also been influenced by Debussy. His music is decidedly tonal, but in no way neo-Romantic or minimalist. He is eclectic, and very much an individual.” Besides “Blue Ridge Airs,” Kahane played the premiere performances, with an ensemble in St. Paul, Minn., of Frazelle’s Piano Quintet.

Leon Kirchner, another Sessions-associated musician, though two generations ahead of Frazelle, is also a composer Kahane champions. The pianist says he has been playing Kirchner’s “Five Pieces” (1984) “all over the place in the past couple of seasons.” And in 1989 Kahane will be the soloist in a major revival of Kirchner’s 1953 Piano Concerto in Boston.

Though his repertory throughout this first decade in his career has been characteristically wide, there are some standard composers Kahane has “not been close to,” he acknowledges. Now he is making up for that, he thinks.

“I’ve rediscovered--or maybe it’s really for the first time--Brahms and Rachmaninoff, two composers I somehow never got closer with. I’m really having fun with them,” the pianist says, in his characteristically quiet manner.

“The more I look at Rachmaninoff, the more I see what a master musician he was. An incredible craftsman!”

The music of Schubert, of course, has long been a Kahane preoccupation, and he does not let pass the opportunity to point out that he has, with violinist Joseph Swensen, just completed “a major Schubert recording project.”

The first of a two-part recording of the complete works by Schubert for violin and piano will be released by RCA this fall. Concurrent with the release will be a concert tour in which Kahane and Swensen play the complete cycle in London, New York and Washington, during 1988-89.

Almost as an afterthought, the California-born pianist reveals that, after several years in Boston, he is taking his family to Rochester, N.Y., where he will join the distinguished piano faculty at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Why would a busy soloist, in the prime of a strong career, take a teaching post now? And why leave Boston, the vitality of whose musical community Kahane has frequently praised?

“Well, it was a very difficult decision,” Kahane responds. “But the offer to go to Eastman comes at a time when I have already spent years on the road, and when my children are at ages when they seem to notice that I’m away so much. I just don’t want, years from now, to regret not having devoted more time to my family.”