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News : Gabriel Kahane In The New Yorker

January 26th, 2009 by Wesley Verhoeve
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Influential critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker shared his view on Gabriel Kahane’s recent debuting of his new song cycle For The Union Dead in a great review. Photos by Louisa (top) and Stacy Schwartz (bottom, Minneapolis show).

The audience at the Philharmonic might be described as hard-core classical: mostly people fifty and older. Later that day, a different crowd showed up to see the singer, songwriter, and composer Gabriel Kahane perform at Le Poisson Rouge, the lively Greenwich Village club that mixes classical music with other genres. Kahane is twenty-seven, and his listeners seem roughly the same age. He is well on his way to developing an original creative personality; his music absorbs everything from nineteen-twenties neoclassicism to blue-grass and modern indie pop, with potent melodies bridging the disparate styles. In league with a six-piece ensemble called yMusic, Kahane presented his song cycle “For the Union Dead,” on poems of Robert Lowell. The texts challenged Kahane’s knack for teasing singable lines out of complex language; at times, the music seemed verbally overstuffed. But in a setting of “The Drinker” Kahane hit a vein of desolate beauty, dwelling obsessively on the phrase “foundering down.” His greatest asset is his sonorous, mesmerizing baritone; he brings to mind Sinatra in his wee-small-hours mood. Sinatra, of course, would have charged more than ten dollars.

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