Voyage Into the Mind of Beethoven

When the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s maestro, Jeffrey Kahane, strikes up the band next weekend, it will be from a comfortable roost, at the piano. Nothing particularly unusual here, for either party involved. Kahane began his career as a pianist and has often been a from-the-keyboard conductor.

But what makes the two-concert program unique, and a locally historic occasion, is the formidable musical landscape. Over the course of one weekend, Kahane will perform and lead all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos: Nos. 2, 3 and 4 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Saturday, and Nos. 1 and 5 (the “Emperor”) at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Sunday.

This will actually be the second time around for Kahane and the cycle. He first performed it a year ago with his other orchestra, the Santa Rosa Symphony, where he has been music director since 1995.

Does he have any fear that the project, dealing in back-to-back concerts with such a towering body of work, might be perceived as a stunt, or at least a self-indulgent showpiece? “There is the risk that it will be perceived that way,” he said by phone from his Santa Rosa home, “[but] you can say this about playing any concerto. There is that aspect of showing off, to put it in the crudest sense.

“As far as doing both [the piano part and the conducting], one of [my] primary motivations is a desire to do these pieces with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra, which is one of the great classical orchestras in the world. I’m a little bit biased,” he said, laughing. “To have the opportunity to shape the orchestra parts and the relationship between the orchestra part and the solo part is a great gift.”

Kahane points to various inspirations for the project, including a previous L.A. Chamber Orchestra Beethoven cycle, of the violin sonatas, with Margaret Batjer, the ensemble’s concertmaster, as the soloist.

And then there is his admiration for the cycle as presented by renowned pianist Alfred Brendel, with James Levine leading the Chicago Symphony, in the mid-’80s. “Those made a tremendous impression on me,” he said. But he points out that at the time, it didn’t occur to him that he would also conduct.

“There’s no question that it’s ambitious--not only mentally, but it’s also physically taxing. But it’s also very gratifying. It’s a wonderful experience to go through as a performer, and if I didn’t think it was also a wonderful thing for the listener, I wouldn’t do it.”

In part, the allure of performing Beethoven cycles is based on the discernible growth patterns in the composer’s music, from his classical 18th century roots to his central role in seeding Romanticism. Even in the piano concertos, which date from 1788 to 1809, the arc of development gives an intriguing overview. Kahane believes that hearing all the work in a concentrated dose can illuminate “the sheer fascination of the evolution of the language and the evolution of the human being. You can see and hear his growth, both in terms of his command of his form and the instrument. You can also hear the deepening of his imagination and the deepening of his spirit.”

“Even though, of course, there are wonderful depths in the first two concerti, suddenly you come to No. 3, and it’s a whole new person there. Rather, it’s a whole new facet of the person. If all we had were the first two, we would certainly know we were in the presence of a very great young composer, but I’m not sure one could predict from them the sheer shock of the Fourth Concerto. You can see the way the pieces reflect on one another and evolve out of one another, and yet are so completely unpredictable.”

Kahane has played each of them many times as a guest soloist with orchestras. The Fourth Concerto, he says, is the one he has played most often and “the one with which I resonate most deeply.” His close relationship with that work, in fact, turned out to be a stumbling block for his conductor persona.

“For a long time, I conducted only the first three from my keyboard, and I thought I would never want to play [and conduct] the Fourth or the Fifth. The reason I didn’t want to do the Fourth was the second movement. That is clearly not only a dialogue, it is almost a kind of debate [between pianist and orchestra], one might say. It is clearly two almost opposing forces, which should be perceived by the audience as such.

“The breakthrough came for me when I realized that, with a fantastic orchestra, I don’t have to conduct it at all. In fact, I don’t conduct that movement. I let the concertmaster lead that movement completely. When I finally did that piece for the first time from the keyboard, I actually found that the second movement was almost more powerful without a conductor, because the orchestra itself becomes the personification of this force, this great power which is mollified and subdued by the single small voice of the piano. That was a sort of a revelation to me.”

Kahane has been grappling with the interplay between conductor and pianist for years.

Born in Los Angeles in 1957, he studied both disciplines at the San Francisco Conservatory, but at first concentrated on the piano as a professional. He placed fourth in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1981, debuted in Carnegie Hall in 1983, and became a popular accompanist for the likes of Dawn Upshaw, Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell. His awards include an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1983 and the Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award in 1987.

In the ‘90s, Kahane’s conducting life finally began to take off. His first brush with professional conducting was from the piano, playing and leading Mozart concertos at the 1988 Oregon Bach Festival, an event he has been involved in ever since.

He has also been conductor in the San Luis Obispo Mozart Festival, and he took over the L.A. Chamber Orchestra two years after assuming the top job with the Santa Rosa ensemble.

Conducting, he explained, “was always something I wanted to do.” The Bach festival opportunity provided him with “a good, a natural, gradual progression and the orchestra was very encouraging. That led to some opportunities to conduct with a baton in my hand and standing up on a podium, rather than sitting down.

“I have to admit that the conducting part of my career progressed at a rate that kind of stunned me. I’ve been very blessed, in a way. I found myself conducting much more and much sooner than I’d imagined when I started doing this.

“As a result, there have been times over the last five or six years when I have really worried about the balance and struggled to carve out enough time to practice.”

In the tradition of conductors who are artistic hyphenates, Kahane is keenly aware of his need to keep on top of his musical disciplines.

“Conducting is a very seductive thing, dangerously so,” he said. “I remain determined not to let the physical discipline [of piano playing] slip. But the demands of conducting, not only in terms of just learning the scores, but the incredible demands of being a music director, have made that a continual challenge. I sometimes feel like I have to fight for the time that it takes just to keep the fingers limber.”

By this point, Kahane said, conducting from the piano bench has “become second nature,” aided, he thinks, by the emotional-political advantage that comes to a conductor who, at least occasionally, is in the trenches with musicians instead of always perched on a podium.

“I feel that I can have a direct and creative contact with every member of the orchestra, in a way that you can never quite feel the same way when you’re standing up with a baton in your hand. When you’re sitting at your instrument, you’re are both separate from the orchestra and part of it at the same time.”

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LOS ANGELES CHAMBER ORCHESTRA. Dates: Saturday, 8 p.m., Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, and next Sunday,7 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA.Prices: $13-$55.Phone: (213) 622-7001, Ext. 215.... have made that a continual challenge.”