Heirloom: Jeffrey Kahane Plays Gabriel Kahane with the CSO at The Pavilion at Ravinia

Reuniting with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra after a riveting 2021 debut, Teddy Abrams channels a zeal for free-flowing life experience through Prokofiev’s pinnacle of style, his Symphony No. 5—“a hymn to freedom and happiness [with] pure and noble spirit” that teases out tender turns of phrase as well as it romps with irreverent edge. Abrams’s renaissance of the Louisville Orchestra as a leading light of imaginative music includes the Creators Corps residency of TJ Cole, whose Megalopolis he brings energized with the rhythm of industry resounding from cities like Chicago. At the center of it all, Abrams is a storyteller, and joined by pianist Jeffrey Kahane he opens up Heirloom, a concerto written for Jeffrey by his son Gabriel—a sometime singer-songwriter and creative resident with ensembles like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and Oregon Symphony. Heirloom immortalizes the inheritances of Kahane family history: from Gabe’s grandmother, who fled the Nazis; from his parents, who provided an open musical background; and from his own memory-making with his older daughter Vera, powered by the imagination of youth.