A new chamber orchestra version of Gabriel Kahane's "Where are the Arms" (the title track to his sophomore LP), performed by Kahane (vocals, guitar, electronics) with the Knights and conductor Eric Jacobsen, from his upcoming album, Heirloom, is out now. The album, due October 10 on Nonesuch, features a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra by the same name, written by the composer/singer/songwriter for his father, the conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane; the Knights, led by Jacobson, join him. 

“Much of Heirloom is rooted in vernacular materials, drawn from my identity as a singer-songwriter,” Kahane says. “A number of these themes and motifs are new, but in the first movement, I shoplifted elements of my song ‘Where are the Arms,’ which then appear more explicitly in the coda of the movement, with the melody passed between piano and trumpet, undergirded by unsettled woodwind chords.

“It felt natural to close the album with the song in its original form—with me singing and playing guitar—but with a newly devised orchestral arrangement,” he continues. “I like the fact that we’re releasing an album whose aesthetic diversity reflects what I’m trying to achieve in Heirloom: a concerto that, despite being at times complex and intricate, unabashedly embraces pop elements.”

Heirloom 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.”

To further highlight the “heirloom,” or legacy, nature of the younger Kahane’s record, Nonesuch recently digitally reissued a recording from its archives: Jeffrey Kahane’s 1986 album of Bach’s Partita No. 4 in D Major/Three Part Inventions (Sinfonias). You can hear it here. (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?’”