Nonesuch Records releases its third album from composer/singer/songwriter, Gabriel Kahane, Heirloom.The album features a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra by the same name, written by Gabriel Kahane for his father, the conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane.The work was commissioned by Linda and (the late) Stuart Nelson, with additional support from the Kansas City Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, St.Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Brooklyn-based orchestral collective The Knights, who also perform on the record.In Gabriel Kahane’s words, “Heirloom is an aural family scrapbook, exploring, in its three movements, a series of inheritances.” The album also features ‘Where are the Arms’, the title track from Kahane’s sophomore LP, heard here in a new orchestral arrangement performed by Gabriel Kahane (vocals, guitar, electronics) with the Knights.To further highlight the ‘heirloom’, or legacy, nature of the younger Kahane’s record, Nonesuch has digitally reissued a recording from its archives: Jeffrey Kahane’s 1986 album of Bach’s Partita No.4 in D Major/Three Part Inventions (Sinfonias), which is available now.(The Kahanes are one of only three parent-child combinations to have each recorded for Nonesuch.)In his liner notes, Gabriel Kahane talks about his parents’ childhood meeting and youthful performances in folk rock bands: “By the time I was a child, my mom and dad had traded the guitars, flutes, and beaded jackets for careers in clinical psychology and classical music respectively.But they remained devoted listeners of folk music.Growing up, it was routine for dad to put on a Joni Mitchell record when he took a break from practicing a concerto by Mozart or Brahms,” he says.“That collision of musical worlds might help to explain the creative path I’ve followed, in which songs and storytelling share the road with the Austro-German musical tradition.“That tradition comes to me through the music I heard as a child, but also through ancestry.My paternal grandmother, Hannelore, escaped Germany at the tail end of 1938, arriving in Los Angeles in early 1939 after lengthy stops in Havana and New Orleans.For her, there was an unspeakable tension between, on the one hand, her love of German music and literature, and, on the other, the horror of the Holocaust.In this piece, I ask: ‘How does that complex set of emotions get transmitted across generations? What do we inherit, more broadly, from our forebears? And as a musician caught between two traditions, how do I bring my craft as a songwriter into the more formal setting of the concert hall?’”‘Kahane’s work…is, first and foremost, an exercise in lyric beauty… his music is suffused with idiosyncratic, enriched tonal harmony…He is one of the finest, most searching songwriters of the day.’ – New Yorker‘Sometimes we pretend that the border dividing the worlds of classical and pop music is clear-cut, but of course that isn’t so.The brilliantly original composer, singer and instrumentalist Gabriel Kahane has made a career of drawing those lines in the sand, then gleefully kicking them to bits.’ – San Francisco Chronicle
