An American composer, singer-songwriter, and music director, Gabriel Kahane is the son of a psychologist mother and the concert pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane. As a child, Gabriel Kahane learned how to sing and play several instruments, and he performed “Happy Birthday” on the violin for Gian Carlo Menotti’s 75th birthday. Kahane attended New England Conservatory, where he studied jazz piano, before he transferred to Brown University, where he wrote his first musical and graduated with a B.A. in music.

In 2006, he released his song cycle Craigslistlieder, a composition that includes eight ads from Craigslist, which captured the attention of the classical world and led to many commissions. Audra McDonald sang excerpts on tour for several years. In 2008, Kahane released his first album as a singer-songwriter. In 2011, his second release, Where Are the Arms, a folk-rock-pop-classical album, featured performances by Chris Thile and Aoife O’Donovan.

Kahane composed songs about his family’s flight from Europe to America during World War II. His family’s salvation also inspired Kahane to write a piano concerto for his father. Kahane is not only a composer influenced by classical music, but also a keen interpreter of his own music, in which he includes many genres and styles. As a songwriter, his dominant style is often compared to that of Rufus Wainwright and Sufjan Stevens, and he has collaborated with both of them.

In 2019, in a column in The New Yorker, critic Alex Ross wrote: “Gabriel Kahane, a Brooklynite singer-composer who sways between pop and classical worlds, has taken the idea of the concept album to rarefied heights.” In 2024, Playwrights Horizons premiered Book of Travelers.

Currently, Kahane is the creative chair of the Oregon Symphony.

“Port of Hamburg” from Book of Travelers, composed in 2018, took its inspiration from a trip Kahane took in 2016. The day after the presidential election, Gabriel boarded a cross-country train, an action which inspired Book of Travelers. His intention was to slow down, get to know some strangers, take in their stories, and talk politics. He wrote that he “packed a suitcase and boarded Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited bound for Chicago. Over the next 13 days, I talked to dozens of strangers whom I met, primarily, in dining cars aboard the trains that would carry me some 8,980 miles around the country. The songs on this album are intended as a kind of loose diary of that journey, and as a portrait of America at a time of profound national turbulence.” In this work as well as his others, Kahane is an astute critic of society. He has explained that his motivation for the trip was to consider what he then thought to be an abruptly altered America as a result of Donald Trump’s first presidential victory:

What’s the endgame of a politics in which we have decided that a huge swath of the public is irredeemable? I think you can only arrive at such a politics when you treat a population as a monolith. … Applying bad faith reasoning to the actions of our ideological opponents may give one a feeling of tidy moral superiority, but it’s no way to build a coalition. I’m thinking about Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, and the beloved community. The tactics that we use to achieve the beloved community have to match the ethos of the society that we want to achieve.

Scored originally for voice and piano, Book of Travelers was later adapted for piano, voice, and orchestra as Pattern of the Rail: Six Orchestral Songs from Book of Travelers. The adaptation is divided into three sections of two songs each, of which the third duo is the most personal: “What If I Told You (October 1, 1939/Port of Hamburg).” In this selection, Kahane remembers his grandmother, who escaped Nazi Germany on “a steamship from Hamburg to Havana / six months on an island / then New Orleans / then a train to Los Angeles / where she keeps a diary …”

Kahane’s subsequent creation has been similarly, decidedly eclectic. Ross remarked that Kahane is one of the finest, most searching songwriters of the day. “Heady as Kahane’s work can be, it is, first and foremost, an exercise in lyric beauty. He sings in a warm, resonant, melancholic baritone, which coasts upward into a plaintive falsetto. … His music is suffused with idiosyncratic, enriched tonal harmony.” Ross remarked that one can hear various influences that inform Kahane’s style, “from Schumann and Debussy to Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell. For the most part, though, he is in possession of his own musical language.”

When Dmitri Shostakovich was growing up, Russian composers, poets, novelists, and painters formed a true avant-garde. Before long, however, the political climate changed, and ideas about the arts changed, too. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich’s symphonies and his two operas fell under Communist attack. Aesthetic theoreticians faulted the symphonies for their bourgeois decadence and ideological formalism; consequently, they were withdrawn from circulation. After Stalin’s death in 1953, artists were again able to express themselves with more freedom and less fear of political reprisal in a new climate of relative tolerance and liberalization. At that time, Shostakovich was gradually restored to favor and allowed to earn a living.

Shostakovich wrote the Piano Concerto No. 2 for the 19th birthday of his son, Maxim, who premiered the work on May 10, 1957, with the USSR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nikolai Anosov. The concerto expresses lightheartedness similar to that of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 but lacks the dark cynicism of its predecessor; rather, its main characteristic is a sense of freedom and abandon. It overflows with youthful vigor, vitality, even romance, reflecting the qualities of a son entering his last teen year. The piece eschews traditional virtuosity, including dialogue between the soloist and the orchestra, exchanging themes and variations instead of the traditional opposition of the soloist and the orchestra. Here, the messages that Shostakovich apparently hid are family references, jokes that only he and Maxim appreciated.

The elegant first movement, Allegro, opens with a lively and amusing solo bassoon introduction before the piano’s entrance with the cleverly joking main theme. The piano enters lightly and unassumingly, introducing much of the melodic material, which contains very surprising twists. The melodic material is often doubled at the octave in both hands; the bright, jaunty themes yield to a military march-like subject for piano and orchestra, complete with snare drum. (This military section was featured in the movie Fantasia 2000 in a segment called “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.”) Moments of extreme dissonance interrupt, but overall, playfulness prevails, with the brilliant wind orchestrations providing a contrapuntal background. In a broad, dramatic moment, the full orchestra triumphantly joins in the main melody, after which the piano recapitulates the theme lightly, almost delicately, in an extended solo. Shostakovich creates an extremely inventive development, followed by a huge climax with all the themes joined at the end, with the piano in unison with the piccolo before the close.

The haunting slow movement, Andante, which moves from minor to major and back, has been said to be the guarantee of the concerto’s lasting popularity. A lyrical slow movement relying heavily on the strings, it forms the dramatic center of the work and is straightforward in its structure and its musical language. It provides a searching meditation with tender, lyrical lines, the sort of longing melody one associates with Russian composers of an earlier, more Romantic era. It starts with a protracted, lovely string chorale; when the piano enters, it is with startling beauty. It continues on, often unaccompanied.

The rather dance-like final movement, Allegro, returns to a playful mood, humorously including a passage quoting the well-known, often-feared, and often-loathed Hanon finger exercises that almost every piano student endures. (Shostakovich said his music was the only way he could get his son to practice the Hanon exercises, but it is quite easy to miss this reference unless you have had the experience of practicing the Hanon exercises yourself.) These sections of virtuosic scalar lines propel the music ahead energetically. In this movement, Shostakovich also uses rhythms in a somewhat intentionally off-balance way, reminiscent of the dance music in some of his other works. All is not quite all jocular in this movement, though, as the mood shifts between joyful and anxious throughout. Moments of darkness also make themselves known, even though the frolic unquestionably predominates. The relatively small accompanying orchestra plays a part in maintaining the clarity and lightness of this charming concerto.

Mary Kouyoumdjian is a composer and documentarian whose projects range from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. She is a first-generation Armenian American whose family fled Turkey as a result of the Armenian genocide; her family was also directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War. She draws on her heritage to create her distinctive sounds and searches the folk histories of her ancestors’ homeland in order to use music as documentary. Her background in experimental composition allows her to join the old to the new effectively. A strong believer in freedom of speech who sees the arts as a way to enlarge the range of interpersonal expression, she creates musical works that often integrate recorded testimonies with resilient individuals and field recordings of place to invite her audiences’ empathy by humanizing complex experiences around social and political conflict.

A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Kouyoumdjian has received commissions for the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beth Morrison Projects/OPERA America, Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can, International Contemporary Ensemble, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the American Composers Forum, Roomful of Teeth, WQXR, REDSHIFT, Experiments in Opera, Helen Simoneau Danse, the Nouveau Classical Project, Music of Remembrance, Friction Quartet, Ensemble Oktoplus, and the Los Angeles New Music Ensemble, among others.

The New York Times has described her works as “eloquently scripted," "emotionally wracking,” and "politically fearless." In her work as a composer, orchestrator, and music editor for film, Kouyoumdjian has collaborated on a diverse array of motion pictures, including writing the original score for the documentary An Act of Worship (Capital K Pictures and PBS’ POV Docs) and orchestrating the soundtrack to The Place Beyond the Pines. Her upcoming projects include an album of her works with the Kronos Quartet and the West Coast premiere of her opera, Adoration, with the LA Opera in 2025.

Kouyoumdjian holds a D.M.A. and M.A. in composition from Columbia University, an M.A. in scoring for film and multimedia from New York University, and a B.A. in music composition from the University of California, San Diego. Dedicated to new music advocacy, Kouyoumdjian co-founded the annual new music conference called New Music Gathering; she also served as the founding executive director of contemporary music ensemble Hotel Elefant and as co-artistic director of Alaska's new music festival Wild Shore New Music.

Kouyoumdjian is on the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University and The New School; she has previously been on the faculty at Columbia University, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Brooklyn College's Feirstein School of Cinema, Mannes Prep, and the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program.

Composed in 2013, two years before the centennial of the Armenian genocide, Tagh (Diary) of an Immigrant is “an imagined journal entry by a hope-filled someone hungrily pushing towards immigration who finds themselves in strange and bittersweet stillness once that immigration is achieved.” The Armenian word tagh means “diary.” The brief work for two violins, viola, cello, and contrabass was commissioned by Ensemble Oktuplus and is also available as a work for string orchestra.