The San Antonio Philharmonic’s quest to establish itself as the city’s premier orchestra has arrived at a significant milestone in attracting a top musical director to lead its musicians.
Conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane was hired in early January as music director designate and will take the baton of the philharmonic officially in the summer.
The 60-member orchestra has been without a music director since starting over in 2022 after its members lost their positions when the San Antonio Symphony dissolved in June of that year.
Newly minted as the San Antonio Philharmonic, or SA Phil, the musicians of the former symphony assembled the orchestra’s first season in August 2022, reached a collective bargaining agreement with the new board in March 2023, announced their second season in May and hired executive director Roberto Treviño in late June.
Kahane has worked with the San Antonio Symphony in the past, dating back to the early 1990s when he appeared as a guest pianist and conductor. Most recently, he opened the philharmonic’s current season as guest conductor in September.
Building momentum
Bassoonist and board president Brian Petkovich said during the September visit, Kahane recognized what the philharmonic is doing in terms of connecting to its community.
Treviño said Kahane expressed that he wanted “to help add to the great movement that the musicians have started,” and that landing a music director of Kahane’s stature will solidify that momentum.
“It’s been so inspiring to feel like somebody is looking at what we’re doing and admiring from afar and saying, ‘I want to be part of that, I believe in what they’re doing,’” Treviño said. “He loves that we’re on the West Side, loves that we have this focus on the community,” and is bilingual, having learned to speak fluent Spanish while growing up in Los Angeles.
Kahane began playing piano at age 5, then at 16 studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music under instructors including American composer John Adams. Kahane was a finalist in the 1981 Van Cliburn piano competition and won the grand prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Competition in 1983.
His extensive career as a conductor began in 1995 with the Santa Rosa Symphony, followed by two decades leading the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra as its longest-tenured music director. He then led the Colorado Symphony for five years beginning in 2005.
Kahane’s performance career has included appearances with the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and he has performed as recital accompanist for renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
He currently teaches at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, and since 2017 has directed the Sarasota Music Festival, winning accolades for diversifying programming and balancing new music with the core classical canon.
“The musicians are really excited,” said Lauren Eberhart, assistant principal trumpet and chair of the five-member orchestra committee that works closely with the board.
“This is going to be a great thing for the musicians, to be able to work with somebody like this all the time,” she said. “He’s top shelf artistically in his playing and his conducting. The feeling is also that this is a real chance to propel us years ahead of where we thought we’d be.”
A 21st-century orchestra
Petkovich said Kahane understands the challenges faced by the nascent philharmonic, which has had to rebuild its leadership, membership and budget essentially from scratch following the collapse of the symphony.
“He’s not at all daunted by what is in front of us because we’re still growing, we’re growing fast,” Petkovich said. “There’s still a ways to go, but having him is going to be such a boost to what we’re trying to do.”
Kahane has experience turning orchestras around. Both the Los Angeles and Colorado orchestras had similarly troubled histories, he said, and went on to flourish under his leadership.
The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra “not only bounced back but went on to become a very, very significant and very successful part of the Los Angeles music scene,” he said. “That didn’t happen overnight, but through dedication and passion and commitment.”
The history of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra closely mirrors that of the San Antonio Symphony. In 1989, the Denver Symphony Orchestra declared bankruptcy, and the musicians went on to form the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.
“Just as happened in San Antonio, the musicians of the orchestra immediately turned around and started an orchestra on their own, independently, a musician-run orchestra with a budget of basically nothing,” Kahane said. “And [30] years later, they have an endowment of over $80 million.”
Kahane has a track record of working to connect orchestras to their communities, introducing the Westside Connections initiative with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra that paired music with speakers from different disciplines, the Discover series that delved into orchestral music through lectures and performance and creating Sound Investment, a commissioning club that invited orchestra patrons to contribute to funding new compositions by living composers.
Treviño said hiring Kahane is “adding to what we really want to do as an organization, to expand on our empathy towards the community … and ways to connect with the community.”
Kahane has already been busily working in his new role. Though he said he cannot yet share details on programming, his first season will reflect his firm belief in mixing new music with favorites of the classical canon.
“I can tell you that the season I am planning … has enormous variety,” Kahane said from his home in Los Angeles, “and will show that the San Antonio Philharmonic is not just going to be a first-rate orchestra, it’s going to be a real orchestra of the 21st century and a real orchestra that speaks to many different constituencies and communities of the city.”
