Biography

 
Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work cuts to the heart. As a singer-songwriter, his most recent release is Magnificent Bird (Nonesuch Records), a meditation on grief and gratitude, written during the chaotic month leading up to the 2020 election.

Highlights of the 20202–23 season include premiere performances of a folk opera, The Right to Be Forgotten, with the Oregon and Cincinnati symphonies, a recital at London’s Southbank Centre, and appearances with the Danish String Quartet. He makes his San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Mr. Kahane’s album and stage spectacle, The Ambassador, was produced at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2014 under the direction of Tony-winner John Tiffany. That work was followed by Book of Travelers—a chronicle of the composer’s 2016 post-election railway journey—which was staged at BAM in 2017 and released as an album by Nonesuch in 2018.

His creative collaborators range from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sylvan Esso, Chris Thile, and Sufjan Stevens, to Caroline Shaw, Anthony McGill, Pekka Kuusisto, and the Attacca Quartet. His prose has appeared in The New Yorker online and in The New York Times; a wide-ranging newsletter “Words and Music,” can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mr. Kahane recently relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his family and has just begun his second term as Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony.

(January 2023)