Composer/singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane's third Nonesuch album, Heirloom, was released October 10, 2025. The album features a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra by the same name, written by Gabriel Kahane for his father, the conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane. The work was commissioned by Linda and (the late) Stuart Nelson, with additional support from the Kansas City Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Brooklyn-based orchestral collective The Knights, who also perform on the record. In Gabriel Kahane's words, “Heirloom is an aural family scrapbook, exploring, in its three movements, a series of inheritances.” The album also features “Where are the Arms,” the title track from Kahane’s sophomore LP, heard here in a new orchestral arrangement performed by Gabriel Kahane (vocals, guitar, electronics) with the Knights. The first movement of the concerto, “Guitars in the Attic,” is out now:

To further highlight the “heirloom,” or legacy, nature of the younger Kahane’s record, Nonesuch digitally reissues a recording from its archives today: Jeffrey Kahane’s 1986 album of Bach’s Partita No. 4 in D Major/Three Part Inventions (Sinfonias). (The Kahanes are one of only three parent-child combinations to have each recorded for Nonesuch.)

In his liner notes, Gabriel Kahane talks about his parents’ childhood meeting and youthful performances in folk rock bands: “By the time I was a child, my mom and dad had traded the guitars, flutes, and beaded jackets for careers in clinical psychology and classical music respectively. But they remained devoted listeners of folk music. Growing up, it was routine for dad to put on a Joni Mitchell record when he took a break from practicing a concerto by Mozart or Brahms,” he says. “That collision of musical worlds might help to explain the creative path I’ve followed, in which songs and storytelling share the road with the Austro-German musical tradition.

“That tradition comes to me through the music I heard as a child, but also through ancestry. My paternal grandmother, Hannelore, escaped Germany at the tail end of 1938, arriving in Los Angeles in early 1939 after lengthy stops in Havana and New Orleans. For her, there was an unspeakable tension between, on the one hand, her love of German music and literature, and, on the other, the horror of the Holocaust. In this piece, I ask: ‘How does that complex set of emotions get transmitted across generations? What do we inherit, more broadly, from our forebears? And as a musician caught between two traditions, how do I bring my craft as a songwriter into the more formal setting of the concert hall?’”

Gabriel Kahane is a musician, writer, and storyteller. Highlights of the 2025-26 season include collaborations with Roomful of Teeth, Attacca Quartet, and Jeffrey Kahane; conducting debuts with Santa Fe Pro Music and the San Antonio Philharmonic; composer-in-residence posts with the University of Iowa and the Charlotte Symphony; the world premiere of a new set of songs at the 92nd Street Y; and the Carnegie Hall premiere of If love will not swing wide the gates, a clarinet concerto written for Anthony McGill.

An avid theater artist, Kahane opened last season at Playwrights Horizons with the off-Broadway debut of two solo pieces, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, the latter of which chronicled the composer’s 8,980-mile railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. His album and stage spectacle, The Ambassador, was produced at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2014, under the direction of Tony-winner John Tiffany. A musical, February House, written with the playwright Seth Bockley, received its New York premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. In 2018, Kahane made his Broadway debut with the score for Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May, Lucas Hedges, and Michael Cera.

Kahane is known for tackling politically thorny subject matter in his work with subtlety and grace, perhaps most notably in his orchestral oratorio, emergency shelter intake form, which addresses economic inequality through the lens of homelessness and housing insecurity, and has been heard from London to New York to Chicago to San Francisco and beyond. He is also increasingly productive as a writer, with prose appearing in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. Via the newsletter Words and Music, Kahane publishes bi-weekly essays on a variety of topics, all of which can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

Kahane’s wide-ranging discography includes five albums as a singer-songwriter, several orchestral projects, and a disc of chamber music (with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider), as well as various other collaborative albums. He has worked with an array of artists spanning the aesthetic gamut, from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sylvan Esso, Chris Thile, and Sufjan Stevens, to the Danish String Quartet, Caroline Shaw, and Pekka Kuusisto, with whom he plays as the duo Council. The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kahane relocated to Portland, OR in the spring of 2020, where he lives with his family and serves as Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony, a post he has held since 2019.