Musician and conductor James S. Kahane is nearing the end of his first season as Music Director of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra. He also holds the position of Principal Conductor with the Helsinki Chamber Orchestra, and Orchestre de Chambre de la Drôme in Die, France.
Naturally, he spends a chunk of his time these days travelling, including criss-crossing the Atlantic. LvT caught up with him after a recent Hamilton concert to talk.
James S. Kahane
Kahane began formal music studies at age 14 at the Conservatoire à rayonnement communal du 13e arrondissement de Paris in his native France. By about t17, though, his attention had shifted to conducting.
At the age of 19, Kahane was admitted to the conducting class at the fabled Sibelius Academy where he studied from 2015 until 2021. One of Europe’s largest music academies, the Sibelius Academy was established in 1882, and has become renowned for turning out a long list of former students who are now among the world’s prominent musicians. Particularly in recent years, that includes many acclaimed conductors such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Klaus Mäkelä, and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, among many others.
In addition to his training in Finland, James pursued his studies by invitation at the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad, in Bernard Haitink’s conducting masterclass at the Lucerne Music Festival, and the Tanglewood Music Festival. During this time there, Kahane studied with Atso Almila, Sakari Oramo, and Hannu Lintu.
In 2018, he was invited by Kristjan Järvi invited to conduct the Baltic Academies Orchestra in Berlin. He has since gone on to conduct many of the world’s major orchestras, and would help to re-establish the Helsinki Chamber Orchestra, where he now holds the title of Principal Conductor.
Kahane officially took up his position as the ninth Music Director of The Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra at the start the 2024/25 season.
The Interview
What made him make that switch from piano to conducting as a teenager?
“It was a mix of several factors,” Kahane says. As he explains, as a young music student, he was more interested in performing and working with groups than he was spending time in a solitary piano studio. “I didn’t really enjoy the solitary aspect of piano,” he says. “Unless you do chamber music, its all on your own.”
It was also an essential question of taste. He was listening almost exclusively to orchestral music, and playing piano transcriptions of orchestral works.
“The mix of those two things kind of led me naturally to conducting,” he observes.
The Finnish Way: The Sibelius Academy
What makes The Sibelius Academy such an exceptional place to learn about conducting?
“I can narrow it down to a combination of three things that are all very important,” Kahane begins.
First, he points out that during his studies, an orchestra was available so that each of the five to seven students in a cohort could work with the musicians directly twice a week.
“It means that every week you can conduct an orchestra for about 40 or 50 minutes, which is a lot.”
It’s an enormous advantage to gain all that experience even before graduation.
“They have this quite interesting and quite effective philosophy of teaching,” he continues.
Essentially, it boils down to: the freedom to develop your own style.
“The teacher does not intervene very much.” It’s akin to letting kids learn how to figure out how to balance and ride on a bicycle on their own, where intervention only takes place if something clearly isn’t working.
The third component was a copious amount of feedback. “All our lessons were recorded on video.” After a class, the students would sit with the teacher, and go through the video to replay the lesson and what was learned. “There, we’d get a huge amount of feedback.”
The duality of total freedom in front of the orchestra while you were conducting, juxtaposed with detailed feedback afterwards, creates a uniquely productive environment for learning, he believes. The proof, as he notes, is in the proverbial pudding.
“You can see it in their professional life,” he points out. “There are no two Finnish conductors that are the same.”
Europe vs North America
The environment for Western art music is different in Europe as opposed to North America. The roles he occupies with various organizations are also not the same. With the HPO, for example, as Music Director, he’s responsible for programming, while as Principal Conductor elsewhere, he can make suggestions, but the wishes of a committee and the Artistic Director ultimately determine what is played.
“Yes, the philosophy of programming is very, very different,” Kahane says of his various roles. In France, with the Orchestre de Chambre de la Drôme, the ensemble is devoted almost exclusively to contemporary music.
“We program new music almost every concert,” he says, drawing similarities to his recent work with the Hamilton Philharmonic and their Intimate & Immersive concert series.
He remarks that the classical music market is a great deal more crowded in Europe than it is in Canada, as a rule. In Helsinki alone, for example, there are five orchestras. “I think the audiences in Finland expect maybe a bit more variety than audiences in Canada,” he says. “If you are […] any orchestra in Helsinki, you have to set yourself a little bit apart.”
European programs will tend to include rarer and lesser heard works, in other words.
Coming Up…
Kahane will be back in Hamilton to conduct the HPO with guest soloist James Ehnes on May 3 in a program that includes Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and the premiere of a new work by HPO Composer Fellow for 2024/25 Massimo Guida.
The HPO then ends their season with community concerts and a pops concert of video game music. For next season, Kahane can’t say much, but he’s promising an approach that will take the orchestra in some new directions.
“We are trying to diversity a little bit our offering,” he explains. That means, there will be some additions to the expected symphonic repertoire and mainstage concerts. “We are dipping our toes into opera, a little bit of ballet,” he says.
- Find our more about the May 3 concert and the HPO season [HERE].
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