Performer Biographies

Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work spans the theater, club, and concert hall.

Highlights of the 2024–25 season include a return to the New York stage in a production at Playwrights Horizons of two solo works, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, which Gabriel performs in repertory. In addition, he tours as a duo with fellow composer/performer Caroline Shaw in the United States and Europe, including performances at the Philharmonie de Paris, Wigmore Hall, and the Concertgebouw. This season also witnesses the premiere of a clarinet concerto for Anthony McGill, a solo debut with the Orchestre National de Lyon, as well as Kahane’s San Francisco conducting debut in Carla Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths.

Gabriel’s discography includes five LPs as a singer-songwriter; The Fiction Issue, an album of chamber music with string quartet Brooklyn Rider; as well as emergency shelter intake form, an oratorio exploring economic inequality through the lens of housing insecurity. That work, commissioned and recorded by the Oregon Symphony, has also been heard in San Francisco, Chicago, and London, with a New York premiere this season at Trinity Church Wall Street. Upcoming recordings include Heirloom, a piano concerto written for his father, the noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane; as well as the debut album from Council, an ongoing project with violinist, composer, and conductor Pekka Kuusisto.

As a theater artist, Kahane made his off-Broadway debut with the score for February House, which received its world premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. He made his Brooklyn Academy of Music debut in 2014 with The Ambassador, in a production directed by John Tiffany. In 2018, he wrote incidental music for the Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May.

Kahane maintains a diverse roster of collaborators from various corners of the musical universe, ranging from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, and Sylvan Esso, to the Danish String Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and Attacca Quartet. As a writer, he has been published by The New Yorker online and The New York Times; a newsletter and collection of essays on music, literature, and politics can be found at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

A two-time MacDowell Fellow, Kahane received the 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, where he serves as Creative Chair for the Oregon Symphony.

Carla Kihlstedt plays the violin, sings, improvises, and composes—sometimes at the service of a simple song and other times as part of a large-scale, multi-faceted performance. Her ongoing collaborative projects cover a wide spectrum of sounds, from the rich and subtle acoustic composers’ collective Tin Hat, the dramatic and alarming experimental rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the intimate, incisive purveyors of song 2 Foot Yard, and the fiercely spontaneous improvisational duo Minamo, with pianist Satoko Fujii. Kihlstedt has also recorded and performed with many of her favorite musicians, including Fred Frith, Tom Waits, Ben Goldberg, Lisa Bielawa, and Colin Jacobsen.

Though the cornerstone of her musical vocabulary comes from her classical training as a violinist, Kihlstedt's world now comfortably reaches far beyond the concert hall, as she has spent much of the last dozen years traveling in the U.S. and abroad with her many bands, playing in concert halls, rock clubs, and theaters, for rock, classical, and experimental audiences.

Kihlstedt has written scores for several dance and theater companies, including Flyaway Productions, inkBoat, and The Joe Goode Performance Group. Further highlighted compositions include Causing a Tiger, with Matthias Bossi and Shazad Ismaily, based around field recordings from her travels, and Pandæmonium, written for the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, which is based on observations from 1660–1880 of the coming of machine age. Four of the nine movements of Pandæmonium are graphic scores sewn by hand.

Kihlstedt is currently developing a new piece with her husband, musician, and actor Matthias Bossi, that looks at family histories as interpreted by memory and myth.

Studies at Peabody Institute, San Francisco Conservatory, and Oberlin Conservatory. Recordings on Tzadik, Hannibal/Ryko, Intakt, The End, Fred (U.K.), ANTI-, Elektra, and Warner Brothers.

San Francisco’s Del Sol Quartet believes that music can, and should, happen anywhere—screaming out Aeryn Santillan’s Makeshift Memorials from a Mission District sidewalk or a rural high school, bouncing Ben Johnston’s microtonal Americana off the canyon walls of the Yampa River or the hallowed walls of Library of Congress, bringing Huang Ruo’s Angel Island Oratorio home to the island detention barracks or across the Pacific to the Singapore International Arts Festival. Del Sol’s performances provide the possibility for unexpected discovery, sparking dialogue and bringing people together.

Since 1992, Del Sol has commissioned or premiered hundreds of works by composers including Terry Riley, Tania León, Frederic Rzewski, Vijay Iyer, Mason Bates, Pamela Z, Chinary Ung, Chen Yi, Andy Akiho, Erberk Eryilmaz, Theresa Wong, and Reza Vali. They especially value their ongoing relationship with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music in Boonville, California.

Huang Ruo—A Dust in Time, Del Sol’s eleventh album, was described in the New York Times as “excavations of beauty from the elemental.” New Del Sol recordings in 2023 include The Resonance Between, a collaboration with North Indian musicians Alam Khan & Arjun Verma, and SPELLLING and The Mystery School with Oakland magical-futurist pop phenomenon SPELLLING.

Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times and “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. Keyboard Magazine writes, “Through her inspired interpretation of works across the 20th and 21st centuries, Cahill has been instrumental in bringing to life the music of many of our greatest living composers.” She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).

Cahill enjoys working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare scores for each performance. She researched and recorded music by prominent early 20th-century American modernists Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford and commissioned a number of new pieces in tribute to their enduring influence. She has also premiered and recorded music by Leo Ornstein, Marc Blitzstein, and other 20th century mavericks. In May 2023, she performed the world premiere of Viet Cuong's Stargazer, a concerto for piano and orchestra, with the California Symphony.