A Felicitous Homecoming

Two disparate but highly scenic musical roads originating in Los Angeles--one personal, the other institutional--converge this week, when Jeffrey Kahane leads the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in the opening concerts of its 29th season. Kahane’s route to podium glory has been navigated from a piano bench, while the storied path of the chamber orchestra has of late been rocky enough to pass for a quarry.

Not, of course, that Kahane and LACO meet as strangers. He has played with this orchestra before and grew up musically with some of these musicians. Kahane, who was born in Beverly Hills (“Beverly Flats,” he emends) has long had durable ties to southern California, but a feeling of return nonetheless accompanies his new post.

“There is definitely a sense of coming home, in the sense of actually having an official place in the musical community,” Kahane says. “I’ve been a regular visitor ever since I left L.A. in the early ‘80s; I doubt there has been a year when I haven’t been here at least once in some capacity. But it’s very different coming back as the music director of one of the more eminent ensembles in the area.”

That ensemble is itself very different than it once was. Founded in 1968 by Neville Marriner, the orchestra’s boom period--recording contracts, a roster approaching symphony size--came at about the time Kahane left L.A., in the heyday of Gerard Schwarz’s tenure as music director. In the decade since, LACO’s artistic reputation has remained secure, but it suffered from personnel problems, lost its prime venues (Royce Hall to earthquake damage; Ambassador Auditorium to closure), faced concomitant budget disasters, administrative turnover and downsizing.

“For a while it seemed that every story we read began, ‘the troubled Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’,” says Carol Ross, LACO board president. After season cutbacks and energetic fund raising, LACO now has no deficit and no debt, Ross reports. “We’re very enthusiastic about the future.”

Kahane’s presence contributes significantly to that enthusiasm. As the orchestra retrenched during its “troubled” years, Christof Perick, Kahane’s immediate predecessor, first downgraded his post from music director to music advisor, and then left altogether at the end of the 1994-95 season. The ensuing yearlong search, Ross emphasizes, was for a true music director, not simply a conductor.

“We were looking for someone who would be not only our primary conductor, but who would provide a vision for the orchestra for the next 10 years,” Ross says. “We were looking for musicianship, of course, and someone who understands the repertory of a chamber orchestra. We hoped for a musician who would play with the orchestra and whom the orchestra could admire and respect as a world-class player. We wanted someone who had a rapport with orchestra and a commitment to education, not just for school kids but the population as a whole.

“Jeffrey has all of that and more. He [auditioned at] the last concert of ‘95-’96 season, and orchestra members were saying to me, ‘You have to get this guy!’ They always play well, but you can see if they are really excited. And then, ultimately it was the sound that he created, because that’s what we’re all about.”

Kahane came into music at an early age on the coattails of his older brother.

“When I was about 5, my parents bought a piano so that my brother could take lessons,” Kahane recalls. “I was very obnoxious, demanding that I have lessons too. They started me out with little five-minute lessons, but after not a long time I was ready for lessons of my own. I started with a wonderful teacher named Howard Weisel, who still teaches here in West L.A. Then he introduced me to his teacher Jakob Gimpel. That was a real turning point, because that was my first exposure--in a teacher-student relationship--to a pianist of world-class stature, and my first real contact with the Old World and the great traditions that he came out of.”

Kahane’s first step out of Los Angeles was a lateral move up the coast to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in piano in 1980. He started on a master’s in conducting, but the course that brings him back to Los Angeles as a rising star among American conductors took a detour, as he established one of the major piano careers of this generation.

“I was always interested in conducting,” Kahane says, “it just came in and out of focus at different times. I was accepted into the Van Cliburn Competition [in 1981]. And a few months later I was in the finals, which completely, instantly changed my life, because I found myself overnight with a career. I really spent the next seven years pretty much focusing entirely on the piano repertoire.”

Indeed. A medalist at that Cliburn Competition, Kahane took the first prize at the Rubinstein Competition in 1983. That year he also won an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and in 1987 he claimed the first Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award. He has played recital and concerto engagements around the world and has become a prized chamber music collaborator with artists such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Joseph Swensen.

But conducting was never too far out of sight. Another turning point came in 1988 at the Oregon Bach Festival. Kahane was playing a Mozart concerto with the Festival Chamber Orchestra, which was usually led by Kathleen Lenski from the concertmaster’s chair. She suggested that he lead his concerto performance from the keyboard, which he did, returning in a similar dual capacity for several years. Before one of those programs, Lenski became ill and Kahane had to step in and conduct the whole concert.

“That started a whole chain of events,” Kahane says. “Right around that time I started a little chamber orchestra in Boston at the Gardner Museum. I had lived in Boston for four years, before leaving to go teach at Eastman School of Music. It was very successful and I was artistic director and conductor there for five seasons. That was a chance for me to cut my teeth on the chamber orchestra repertoire.

“Then, several years ago, I decided it was really time to take the plunge into the big stuff. I conducted a concert at Eastman with the school orchestra, and then I went out to Santa Rosa, [Calif.] and auditioned for the orchestra there and got the job.”

That job--music director of the Santa Rosa Symphony--began in 1995, and Kahane now lives in Santa Rosa with his wife and two children. (He will remain head of that orchestra as well as LACO.) Intervening years found him as a guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Royal Philharmonic and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in London, among many others. He has been associate conductor of the San Luis Obispo Mozart Festival since 1992.

“I almost fell into conducting, in a certain way,” Kahane says. “It was something I wanted to do--I wouldn’t say that it was without any effort on my part--but it was also an organic, natural process.”

Last month, Kahane and the Chamber Orchestra tested their new relationship at the Hollywood Bowl, with two concerts in one of the hottest weeks of the summer. During a morning rehearsal, however, there was scant evidence of any musical wilt on stage. Kahane’s rapport with his new orchestra was readily apparent. Spirits were loose enough that at one point he conducted cheerfully for a few minutes with bassoonist Ken Munday’s small daughter in his arms.

A short, stocky figure with a trademark tousle of exuberantly curly hair, Kahane worked quickly and quietly, dealing at almost every stop with specific musical matters of tempo and articulation. That should not be taken as an indication of Kahane’s interpretive focus, however, or even of his usual rehearsal methods. The Bowl schedule allotted him only half the usual rehearsal time for these programs, enforcing pragmatic concision.

“A friend of mine jokes that modern rehearsal schedules allow you five ideas per movement,” Kahane mused afterward in his dressing room. “Well, here it’s maybe three ideas per movement. You have to be really selective about what you work on.

“Often I do talk about metaphysical matters in rehearsal. I am a great believer in the narrative content of a lot of classical repertoire. I am emphatically not a person who believes it is all just a matter of articulation, dynamics, and balance. Aside from the many stylistic things, ideas about sound and so on, the thing that Gimpel gave me that was perhaps the central gift I got in my later student years was the idea that these great works are about something.

“Of course, that’s not true of everything, but I believe the Mozart piano concerti, for example, are stories, they are dramas, they have content that goes beyond just tones. And that’s true for a tremendous amount of the repertoire.”

Kahane played a different Mozart concerto on each of the two Bowl programs he conducted, to highly favorable reviews. In surely one of the summer’s most stunning displays of versatility, Kahane had played the daunting, and more and more ubiquitous Third Concerto of Rachmaninoff in San Luis Obispo the Sunday immediately before his week with LACO at the Bowl.

That Rachmaninoff performance suggests something about the range of Kahane’s musical curiosity and interests, as well as his versatility and virtuosity. Those who know him best as a supremely sensitive Mozartean may be startled to hear that last season in Santa Rosa he conducted Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and Sibelius’ Fifth--and loved it. He launches the LACO season this coming weekend with the world premiere of “Laconic Variations” by Kenneth Frazelle, the new Kahane-appointed LACO composer-in-residence, and later this season he conducts the West Coast premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’ Double Concerto for Violin and Guitar.

“I’m giving a lot of thought to different kinds of programming,” Kahane reports. “I think the orchestra is very excited about the programs for the coming season because there a lot of things that they can sink their teeth into. For example, we’re doing both of the Brahms serenades, which they haven’t done for a long time, andthe ‘Eroica,’ which the orchestra has never played. I know there are people who don’t think it should be done by a chamber orchestra, but I totally disagree-- I think it’s fabulous either way, just a different kind of experience.

“I’m starting by pushing the envelope a little bit in that way, but I’m also looking at different programming concepts, for example, doing chamber music and orchestral works on the same program. That’s something I’m very excited about.”

Kahane’s excitement is undampened by LACO’s recent vicissitudes. He echoes Carol Ross’ optimism, noting that subscriptions are up and that the orchestra will soon return to Royce Hall, scheduled to reopen next spring.

“Of course, when I took the job a year ago I was very much aware of all the difficulties,” Kahane says, “and I had some trepidation about whether we’d be able to shake it off. The orchestra has been through a lot of very, very trying stuff and there’s a little bit of a sense still of being in recovery.

“But the first thing that I would say about this band, which is true of very few orchestras anywhere, is that it is to a man and woman a collection of virtuosos, a collection of remarkable musicians who, for a love of this repertoire, come together and use their individual gifts for the sake of a larger goal. That requires a real generosity of spirit, and I think that’s really there.”

Among other signs that LACO is indeed back is a BMG recording project slated for next September--a Ned Rorem song cycle commissioned by the orchestra, featuring countertenor Brian Asawa. Touring, which brings with it exhausting fund-raising challenges, is being approached cautiously, but Kahane is hoping to expand LACO’s strong educational program. Intelligent, affable, and articulate in Spanish as well as English, Kahane wants to “do the Leonard Bernstein thing” on a new family series, really digging into specific musical issues with a particular piece.

And if this natural communicator seems an ideal teacher for all ages, it is perhaps because he is also the most enthusiastic of eternal students.

“Working with [the chamber orchestra] is fundamentally going to be a great educational experience for me,” he says. “I’m always learning from my colleagues.

“People always ask, ‘How did you learn to conduct?’ I did it by doing it, which is the only way you really can do it. Ultimately, it’s the orchestras that teach you, and hopefully it’s a mutual thing. I hope that I will be able to teach whatever I have to impart. But there’s a tremendous amount of wisdom in a great orchestra, and any conductor who gets up in front of a bunch of wonderful musicians and doesn’t think he has something to learn from them is very full of . . . himself or herself.”

*

* Jeffrey Kahane and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Bel Air Presbyterian Church, 16221 Mulholland Drive, Friday, 8 p.m., and at the Alex Theater, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, Saturday, 8 p.m. $12-$42. (213) 622-7001, Ext. 215.