- December 4, 2025
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When Sarasota Orchestra President and CEO Joseph McKenna returned to his office after the long Labor Day weekend, he had his work cut out for him. He and a committee began the search for a new music director of the Sarasota Music Festival following the exit of Jeffrey Kahane on Aug. 25.
Kahane, a Los Angeles-based conductor, pianist, educator and scholar, recently became music director of the San Antonio Philharmonic. During his nine years as music director of the Sarasota Music Festival, he raised its stature and introduced new artists and genres of music.
A summer 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 61 years.
Kahane’s departure coincides with the closing of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the de facto campus of the Sarasota Music Festival for 40 years.
In the wake of Kahane’s departure, the festival will be scaled back to from three weeks to two in 2026, when it will run from June 1-13. It will be curated by its faculty members. Fellows will be housed at the Art Ovation Hotel in downtown Sarasota.
“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.”
Held each June, the Sarasota Music Festival offers dynamic, innovative concerts in Holley Hall and the Sarasota Opera House. Its star faculty members play alongside festival fellows, often performing in public for the first time.
In the classical music world, unexpected departures and last-minute schedule changes are a fact of life. Most artists are booked at least two years in advance, but life happens.
“We’re thrilled that Jeffrey gave us nine wonderful years. His work in San Antonio appears to be evolving, and we understand that. Now, it’s time to imagine the future,” Sarasota Orchestra President and CEO Joseph McKenna said in an interview.
Kahane is the third director in the festival’s history, following co-founder Paul Wolfe and Robert Levin. But his life has gotten a lot busier since he was first appointed music director of the Sarasota Music Festival in 2016.
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.
Finding a music director who is the right fit for a festival or an orchestra can be a painstaking affair. It took the Sarasota Orchestra two years to locate a successor to Music Director Bramwell Tovey. The beloved conductor died unexpectedly in 2022, less than a year after he was appointed to the position.
As they vetted candidates for the maestro job, the Sarasota Orchestra brought potential music directors to town as guest conductors to see how they interacted with musicians and audiences. In 2024, the powers-that-be at Sarasota Orchestra decided Tovey would be succeeded by Grammy Award winner Giancarlo Guerrero, music director of the Nashville Symphony.
The 2025-26 season will mark Guerrero’s first season as full-time maestro in Sarasota. Last year, the charismatic conductor, who spent his childhood in Costa Rica, held the title of music director designate. He is the seventh music director in the Sarasota Orchestra’s history.
All of which is to say that Kahane will not be replaced overnight. The search committee will include Sarasota Orchestra management, board members, musicians and other stakeholders, McKenna says.
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 past two summers.
“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.
In addition to 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 that bears his name. 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 past 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. On Oct. 10, Nonesuch Records will release a recording of “Heirloom” made at Carnegie Hall in May 2024. Jeffrey Kahane played piano in that concert along with The Knights, a Brooklyn-based orchestra collective, under the direction of Eric Jacobsen.
Even though he is stepping down from the Sarasota Music Festival, Kahane has agreed to be a guest soloist with the Sarasota Orchestra in the 2026-27 season. McKenna says he is “confident” that Kahane will return to the festival in the future as a teacher and a performer.
Coming back home to the Sarasota Music Festival is a tradition of sorts. Fellows often return as faculty members as their careers evolve. Among the alumni who have recently come back to teach and perform are violinists Sandy Yamamoto and Elena Urioste and cellist Karen Ouzounian.
Some festival fellows are even asked to join the Sarasota Orchestra. Among them are Hugo Bliss, who joined the orchestra as co-principal horn player in the 2024-25 season.
One reason the Sarasota Music Festival is so popular with arts patrons is that its master classes and rehearsals are open to the public and can be attended for as little as $5.
Well-wishers from the community often deliver food to the fellows to keep them well fed as they rehearse in Holley Hall at the Beatrice Friedman Symphony Center, a pleasant stroll from the nearby Hyatt Regency.
“We really lost what felt like a campus when the Hyatt closed,” McKenna says.
The location of the Sarasota Music Festival will also move with the arrival of the Sarasota Orchestra’s new Music Center.
The project near the intersection of I-75 and Fruitville Road is expected to break ground in 2027 and open for the 2029-30 season.
An anonymous $60 million donation has been pledged to the project, estimated to cost between $375 million and $425 million.
While the Music Center will contain state-of-the-art facilities for the Sarasota Orchestra, its children’s programs and the Sarasota Music Festival, it will not offer housing for visiting artists.
“Housing is a problem for everyone in Sarasota right now,” McKenna says, adding that when the time comes, beds will be found for festival fellows near the new music center.
