Thursday, September 10, 7:30 pm, CNU’s Ferguson Center for the Arts
Sunday September 13, 2:30 pm, Sandler Center for the Performing Arts
The Virginia Symphony Orchestra will open its 2026/27 Season with Mahler’s Titan Symphony. Music Director Eric Jacobsen, the Macon and Joan Brock chair, will conduct a program featuring renowned pianist Jeffrey Kahane performing Heirloom Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, written by his son, composer Gabriel Kahane.
As a pianist, conductor, and scholar, Jeffrey Kahane’s career highlights run the gamut from concertos with the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony to recitals with Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell to European tours.
“Dedicated with love, admiration, gratitude, and awe” to his father, Gabriel Kahane wrote the piano concerto, Heirloom, infused with Austro-German musical tradition, as an aural family scrapbook that explores a series of inheritances. He grew up in a secular Jewish household where folk music, from artists such as Joni Mitchell, and classical music flowed throughout the home.
Gabriel Kahane’s grandmother, Hannelore, a prominent figure in his life, babysat German-Jewish composer and developer of the modern 12-tone technique Arnold Schoenberg’s children before escaping Germany in 1938. The second movement, “My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg” is inspired by the intergenerational memory, Kahane’s experience with Berg’s works, and the indirect connection to Berg, a student of Schoenberg’s.
Born to Jewish parents, Gustav Mahler converted to Catholicism to be the director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897. Mahler was constantly berated by antisemitic press and political leaders throughout his career as a conductor and composer. He described himself as, “thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.”
When developing the 2026/27 season, the VSO focused this program on Rosh Hashanah. “This concert centers around the theme of legacy and new life. Mahler’s first Symphony, Titan, goes through an epic journey of life from first breath to last with all the trials and triumphs in-between,” says Jacobsen. “Kahane’s Heirloom concerto does a similar journey, but on a much more personal level by telling his family’s story and some of their most treasured memories. We wanted to lead our patrons from the Jewish community into this holiday about rebirth and celebrating new life and reflecting on the past year.”
Tickets and information: VirginiaSymphony.org.