A Feast for the Ears: Sarasota Orchestra’s Summer Music Festival

By Ryan G. Van Cleave | Featured Photo of Jeffrey Kahane | May 2022

In 1965, the Sarasota Music Festival began as a one-week event that featured seven guest mentors and a handful of student musicians. Within a few years, the festival’s success necessitated that it expand into a three-week offering that soon gained national and international attention.

Today, more than 500 musicians from the top colleges and conservatories in the world apply each year to be one of the 60 fellows who get to work side-by-side with 40 guest faculty musicians who represent some of the nation’s major performing organizations, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, and Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

In its nearly-60-year history, the festival, a program of Sarasota Orchestra, has known only three music directors, with co-founder Paul Wolfe first serving in that role until 2006. Pianist Robin D. Levin headed the festival for the next decade. Then Jeffrey Kahane became music director in 2017.

Kahane is a California-based conductor and soloist who made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1983. These days, Kahane still performs regularly while serving as the Professor of Keyboard Studies at USC’s Thornton School of Music. Among his other accomplishments, Kahane served for two decades as the Music Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. 

Kahane had known about Sarasota Orchestra for a very long time, having performed with it as a soloist “many years ago,” he says, “though at the time, it was then called the Florida West Coast Symphony!” Years later, when Levin was overseeing the event, he called Kahane to invite him to fill in for a last-minute faculty cancellation. It went so well that Levin soon asked Kahane to apply to succeed him as Music Director. After an international search and subsequent interviews, Kahane earned the job. 

“It’s such a thrilling and wonderful experience. This year, in the space of three weeks, we’re doing 14 programs, which means we’re averaging four different programs a week,” he says. Yet he’s quick to note that the festival is designed for teaching. That means he and his 40 guest faculty colleagues mentor the fellows through a busy schedule of concerts, master classes, coaching sessions, and open rehearsals. 

“There’s a tremendous sense of excitement about working with such a remarkable group of young musicians each year, who are usually in the range of age 18 to late 20s. Some are still in school, some will have just graduated, and occasionally, some will have just earned jobs.” 

Each week of the festival, a different group of faculty rotates in, so the fellows get intense exposure to that group. For audiences, this means the events are widely varied and always fresh. For the fellows, it means that the opportunities for learning and growing are exponentially greater.  

“As Music Director,” Kahane explains, “I have the privilege of selecting most of the music that gets played, and I do that in consultation with my colleagues. Here’s yet another particularly wonderful and unusual thing about the festival—the fellows themselves get input on what they get to play. Before the festival starts, they’re asked to send in a list of things they’d especially like to play, and that gets serious consideration.”

Each week, there’s a faculty-only concert, as well as a fellows-only concert. But there are also two concerts each week where they all play together. “That’s one of the most thrilling things for the audience. It’s always a great, wonderful thing to witness the sort of spark and magic that happens when young musicians at the beginning of their career get to work with those have accomplished so much professionally.” 

Something that makes the 2022 season particularly special for Kahane is that one of the musical guests shares his last name—it’s his son, Gabriel, who’s an accomplished singer, musician, and composer. While they’ve worked together before, it’s rare because they don’t live in the same city, so Kahane is incredibly excited about this opportunity. “He’ll be working with Caroline Shaw, a composer who won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago. They’re good friends and have performed together many times. They’ll be playing their own original music together, and then they will also perform with a group of the fellows, too.”

Highlights of this year’s Sarasota Music Festival—which runs June 5-25—include Kahane and Levin giving a joint lecture on festival topics, and acclaimed pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, a festival alumna, serving as soloist for Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F Minor in the first festival Saturday performance. The festival ends delightfully, too, with a program entitled “From America to Italy.” During that program, festival alumna and faculty violinist Francesca Anderegg performs Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 before the entire event concludes with Felix Mendelssohn’s beloved Symphony No. 4, which is a high-spirited tribute to Italy’s sunshine and luxurious breezes.

Kahane adds that “I’ve been so touched by the passion that I feel with Sarasota audiences. There’s obviously a great love of the arts there. For a city of its size, the richness of its cultural offerings is impressive. I’m so glad to be a continuing part of it.”

For more information about Sarasota Orchestra’s Summer Music Festival, please visit www.sarasotaorchestra.org/festival or call the Box Office at 941.953.3434.