- December 4, 2025
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Pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane is stepping down as music director of the Sarasota Music Festival after nine years in the job, the Sarasota Orchestra announced Monday.
A June program of the Sarasota Orchestra, the Sarasota Music Festival has been bringing together internationally recognized faculty members and pre-professional musicians, known as fellows, for more than 60 years.
Kahane is the third director in the festival's history, following co-founder Paul Wolfe and Robert Levin.
Many of the festival's master classes and rehearsals can be attended for as little as $5. Its dynamic, innovative concerts in Holley Hall and the Sarasota Opera House featuring star faculty members playing alongside fellows, often performing in public for the first time, are much anticipated, joyful affairs for Sarasota music lovers.
“It has been one of the great privileges of my career to lead the Sarasota Music Festival,” Kahane said in a statement. “The Festival holds a unique and vital place in the musical landscape, and I’m proud of what we’ve created together—especially the extraordinary faculty and transformative experiences we’ve offered our fellows.”
As the Sarasota Orchestra looks for Kahane's successor, the 2026 Sarasota Music Festival will be scaled back to two weeks from three.
“In connection with this transition, we are thrilled that Jeffrey will return to perform as a guest soloist with the Sarasota Orchestra in the (20)26-27 season and we are confident that he will be returning to the festival in the future as a teacher and performer,” said Sarasota Orchestra President and CEO Joseph McKenna in a statement.
In addition to steering the Sarasota Music Festival through the COVID-19 shutdown, which resulted in the loss of the 2020 festival, and managing the festival's recovery from the pandemic, Kahane expanded the roster of faculty members.
He also recruited internationally known chamber ensembles to perform, collaborate with and coach festival fellows. Among those ensembles are the Attacca, Calidore, Borromeo and the Pacifica string quartets, as well as the Montrose Trio.
Kahane expanded the festival's agenda to include the teaching and performance of world music, jazz and folk music, with violinist/fiddler Tessa Lark and cellist Mike Block taking center stage during the last two summers.
Kahane was named music director of the San Antonio Philharmonic beginning with the 2024-25 season. It is not uncommon for conductors to hold key positions at more than one institution, particularly if they have different performance schedules, but Kahane's new job is quite demanding.
The San Antonio Philharmonic was formed in 2022 following the dissolution of the San Antonio Symphony, and is attempting to build on the city's legacy of classical music while reflecting its diverse population. In 2025, the orchestra moved into its new home, the Scottish Rite Auditorium.
In addition to his duties in San Antonio, Kahane is a faculty member at the USC Thornton School of Music, where he teaches small classes of gifted students and coaches. He also accepts guest conducting and piano solo engagements at orchestras around the world.
The next edition of the Sarasota Music Festival, will run from June 1-13, 2026 and will be curated by the festival's faculty artists.
“As we celebrate the past success of the festival, we also come together to envision our next chapter based on the solid foundation built by a rich legacy of artistic leaders: Paul Wolfe, Robert Levin and Jeffrey Kahane,” said Tom Koski, Sarasota Orchestra board chair.
After co-founding the Sarasota Music Festival at New College of Florida in the mid-1960s, Wolfe spent more than three decades as artistic director and conductor of the Florida West Coast Symphony, which rebranded in 2008 as the Sarasota Orchestra. The festival and symphony merged in 1985. Wolfe died in 2016.
Levin, the festival's second music director, has been a faculty artist since 1979 and delivers an annual lecture. He is considered one of the world's leading experts on improvisation in classical music, which he has demonstrated in recent years during his concerts at the festival, with the encouragement of Kahane, an advocate of improvisation.
Kahane is also a passionate champion of new, or contemporary, classical music, loosely defined as having been composed during the last 50 years.
A native of Los Angeles, Kahane is a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied piano. After private studies with John Perry, Kahane went on to be a finalist in the 1981 Van Cliburn Competition, and his piano career began in earnest after he won the Grand Prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Competition in 1983. Following that achievement, he began making solo appearances both in recitals and with major orchestras around the world.
Kahane made his conducting debut in 1988, at the Oregon Bach Festival. He was the music director of the Santa Rosa Symphony for 11 years and the Colorado Symphony for five years. For two decades ending in 2017, he served as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
Among the career highlights Kahane cites in his official online bio are concertos with the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony, recitals with Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell, European tours conducting the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and collaborations with the Emerson, Miró, Dover, Attacca and Calidore String Quartets.
Recently, Kahane has been collaborating with his son Gabriel Kahane on "Heirloom," a three-movement concerto written by the younger Kahane that honors the history of their family, beginning with the escape from Nazi Germany of Jeffrey's mother.
When "Heirloom" was performed at the 2025 Sarasota Music Festival, Gabriel conducted the festival orchestra while his father played piano.
Before bringing "Heirloom" to Sarasota, father and son played the same roles — pianist and conductor — at the St. Paul Chamber Chamber Orchestra. In May 2024, Jeffrey Kahane played Gabriel's concerto at Carnegie Hall with The Knights, a Brooklyn-based orchestra collective, under the direction of Eric Jacobsen. It was recorded for release by Nonesuch Records on Oct. 10.
