LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Jeffrey Kahane - Conductor and Piano

Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 21
Mozart - Symphony No. 38, Prague
Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 20

Watch the artist talk about conducting and playing at the same time...

This is not No. 20 or 21. It is No. 22. But, it'll give you an idea of what it's like...

"Equally at home at the keyboard or on the podium, Jeffrey Kahane has established an international reputation as a truly versatile artist, recognized for his mastery of a diverse repertoire ranging from Bach to John Adams.

Since making his Carnegie Hall debut in 1983, Kahane has given recitals in many of the nation’s major music centers including New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. He appears as soloist with the major U.S. orchestras and is a popular figure at all of the major U.S. summer festivals. Kahane is equally known for his collaborations with artists and chamber ensembles such as Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, Joshua Bell, Thomas Quasthoff, and the Emerson and Takács quartets.

Currently in his 18th season as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Kahane was previously music director of the Colorado and Santa Rosa symphonies. Recent and upcoming engagements include appearances at the Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Caramoor, Ravinia, Blossom, and Oregon Bach festivals; concerto performances with the Toronto, Houston, Milwaukee, Oregon, Nashville, and Colorado symphonies and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; playing/conducting with the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco, National, Detroit, Vancouver, Indianapolis, and New Jersey symphonies; and conducting the New England Conservatory, Juilliard, and National Repertory orchestras.

Kahane’s recordings include works of Gershwin and Bernstein with Yo-Yo Ma for Sony, Paul Schoenfield’s Four Parablesfor Decca/Argo, the complete Brandenburg Concertos (on harpsichord) on the Haenssler label, and Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety for Virgin Records, which was nominated by Gramophone magazine for their Record of the Year award. His recordings as conductor include the Bach violin concertos with Hilary Hahn and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon.

A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory, Kahane’s early piano studies were with Howard Weisel and Jakob Gimpel. First Prize winner at the 1983 Rubinstein Competition and a finalist at the 1981 Van Cliburn Competition, he was also the recipient of a 1983 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the first Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award in 1987. Mr. Kahane is an avid linguist who reads widely in a number of ancient and modern languages, and he received a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. Kahane resides in Santa Rosa with his wife, Martha, a clinical psychologist. They have two children — Gabriel, a composer, pianist and singer/songwriter and Annie, a dancer and poet."

Review: New York Philharmonic Gives Mozart His Due

The New York Philharmonic, soon to vacate Avery Fisher Hall for the summer, is stealing a march on the Mostly Mozart Festival, which moves in next month. As the festival continues to evolve in directions that have less and less to do with its namesake, the Philharmonic, perhaps sensing an opportunity, offers a Mozart program of its own this week: the “Prague” Symphony and the Piano Concertos No. 20, in D minor, and No. 21, in C, with Jeffrey Kahane as guest conductor and soloist.

The “Prague” must be every opera lover’s favorite Mozart symphony. Composed in Vienna in 1786 and evidently given its premiere in Prague early the next year, it is a virtual caldron of tunes more or less shared with “Le Nozze di Figaro” (1786) and “Don Giovanni” (1787).

More than that, the symphony, played before intermission, evokes the moods and characters of those operas, especially “Don Giovanni.” Mr. Kahane treated all of that a bit matter-of-factly at Wednesday evening’s performance, with little lingering to search out lascivious byplay in dark recesses or to limn a bumbling Leporello.

So it came as a delightful surprise, after intermission, when Mr. Kahane injected the condemnatory sequence of rising and falling scales from “Don Giovanni” into his own cadenza for the first movement of the D minor Concerto. His playing was deft and virtuosic in both concertos, though his fast tempos in the outer movements of the C major resulted in some blurred scalar passages and a slightly hectic feel at times.

You might have feared a certain weightiness from the Philharmonic in Mozart, but Mr. Kahane generally drew stylish playing from a reduced band of 40 or so. The strings had a pliant quality, and the woodwinds were especially fine.

Mostly Mozart has nothing to fear on this terrain, but it is nice to hear the Philharmonic continuing to hone its versatility.