REVIEW: The Knights Meld Musical Styles at Zankel Hall
Above photo by Jennifer Taylor.
by David Wolfson
May 16, 2024
“Wow, your dad’s really good.”
That was conductor Eric Jacobsen to singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane during the applause for Heirloom, the piano concerto Kahane had written for his father, famed pianist Jeffrey Kahane. This is the world of The Knights, in which music is a family affair, even Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall is a living room to which we’ve all been invited to admire and enjoy each other’s playing, and the lines between pop music and concert music are blurry at best.
This was the third and final concert of The Knights’ residency at Zankel Hall this year, and Heirloom, of which the orchestra was a co-commissioner, was receiving its pandemic-delayed New York premiere. Heirloom is a three-movement work on themes of intergenerational inheritance, with one movement based on the entangling of Gabriel Kahane’s parents’ musical lives and his own, one on his grandmother’s post-war feelings about German music, and the third on the unknowable question of what his children will inherit from him.
Photo by Jennifer Taylor.
The melding of musical styles and, ideally, their interrogation of one another, is a major part of this orchestra’s aesthetic. This fell a little short of the ideal. Kahane’s arrangements of his own pop tunes, a major part of the first movement, sounded like what used to be called “light classical” or “pops” arrangements, sparkle-heavy with percussion. The references to Second Viennese School atonal music in the second movement were so subtle as to be nearly overlookable. Still, the piece was engaging and sonically interesting, and portions of the second movement achieved a real poignancy. Kahane senior, as Jacobsen noted, was really good, playing with a self-assured and communicative focus and clarity throughout.
The concert had opened with the world premiere of Michi Wiancko’s orchestration for violin and chamber orchestra of Jessie Montgomery’s Rhapsody No. 2, originally for solo violin. Colin Jacobsen, Eric’s brother and co-artistic director and The Knights’ concertmaster, was the soloist. This is a fun, if brief, piece, combining a quirky lyricism with flashes of spiky virtuosity. The idea of adapting a solo violin piece for orchestra is an audacious one; the most successful moment for me was a unison passage that began with the soloist unaccompanied and gradually added in first the section violins and then the rest of the orchestra.
Both of these pieces, as well as Gabriel Kahane’s arrangement of his song “Where Are the Arms” for vocals, guitar and orchestra, suffered somewhat from orchestrational imbalances, top-heavy with winds and percussion, with the strings less audible. I was unsure whether The Knights simply hadn’t really adapted to Zankel Hall’s acoustics yet, or possibly both Wiancko and Kahane were just members of Overorchestrators Anonymous. After hearing Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”), I have to incline to the latter option, because the strings were emphatically foregrounded, showing core and guts, with the winds behaving themselves nicely in their Mozartean supportive roles. This symphony was Mozart’s version of a potboiler, composed for a Parisian audience that liked “noisy” symphonies, and thus is probably as Knights-ish as Mozart ever got. Jacobsen emphasized verve and rhythm in the outer movements and a direct, affecting simplicity in the Andante.
Photo by Jennifer Taylor.
The strings were also featured in the New York premiere of Anna Clyne’s Shorthand for cello and string orchestra, with Karen Ouzounian as soloist. I have to say I found this piece baffling. Ostensibly “referencing” themes from Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for violin and piano, the two major portions of the 12-minute work consisted of a repetitive oscillation between two saccharine major seventh chords that sounded for all the world like Henry Mancini, and a violent tune based on a Middle-Eastern scale. Ouzounian played it all with commitment and finesse, as did the orchestra.
The evening’s encore was an arrangement of Gabriel Kahane’s song “Little Love,” with Kahane singing, his father Jeffrey on piano and The Knights’ strings again featured. This one was magic—a moment where pop and classical transform each other to become something that neither of them can be alone, what I think of as a large part of The Knights’ raison d’être. …it turns out that Dad plays a mean pop-styled piano, too. Welcome to the living room!
David Wolfson holds a PhD in composition from Rutgers University, and has taught at Rutgers University, Montclair State University and Hunter College. He is enjoying an eclectic career, having composed opera, musical theatre, touring children’s musicals, and incidental music for plays; choral music, band music, orchestral music, chamber music, art songs, and music for solo piano; comedy songs, cabaret songs and one memorable score for an amusement park big-headed-costumed-character show. You can find more information here.
