Big fish start in small ponds: they have to.

>From recent local history:  Kent Nagano began with the tiny Berkeley
Symphony (and stayed loyal to it through the years); Patrick Summers was
recently still conducting SFO Center `student concerts'; Michael Tilson
Thomas' first experience was leading a high-school marching band in LA;
Donald Runnicles must have started waving the stick in some Edinburgh
community hall; and so it goes.

I propose for examination the current rapid rise on the podium of the
excellent pianist, Jeffrey Kahane, in the rural communities of Santa Rosa,
Los Angeles and Eugene.

He is now music director of the the Santa Rosa Symphony and of the Los
Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and he is the emerging second-in-command to
the saintly Helmuth Rilling at the Oregon Bach Festival.  Here is a
baby-in-conductor-years, doing some good work, and getting better by
the day.

Emerging from Santa Rosa's Luther Burbank Center (a 1,500-seat auditorium,
packed full with a non-coughing audience which doesn't applaud between
movements), I am more convinced than ever that Kahane is now a member of
the club of More-Than-Promising Young Conductors.

First, programming.  Well before the coming April double coup of California
debuts for Thomas Quasthoff and James Tayor in the Britten "War Requiem,"
Kahane's January programs present something old and something new, in a
triumph of symmetry.

Bracketed by two works of variations (Kenneth Frazelle's "Laconic
Variations" and Ginastera's "Variaciones Concertantes"), the Santa Rosa
program called for two double concertos which, in turn, were closely
linked.

The Mozart Symphonie Concertante was followed by Edgar Meyer's Double
Concerto for Bass and Cello -- the composer performing the solo, with
cellist Cecilia Tsan.  Meyer's 1995 concerto is a kind of reverse
engineering of the Mozart, with a virtually identical structure.

(The season's other programs include works by Enesco, Bloch, Ravel,
Janacek, Bartok, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich -- putting Santa Rosa
in the regional vanguard of non-vanilla programming.)

Second in the Kahane arsenal is his ability to attract major artists to
this small town 60 miles north of San Francisco.  Besides the names already
dropped, recent and future soloists include Makoto Nakura (marimba),
pianists Andre Watts and Jon Kimura Parker; violinists Hilary Hahn (whose
brand-new CD is a beaut) and Pamela Frank, cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Third, the performances.  Kahane, an unfailingly gentle gentleman on
the podium, has whipped into shape this group (most of whom work in three
or even four regional orchestras) into a fine ensemble.  Except for the
occasionally raw brass, the orchestra did well in the two concertos, and
shined in the Ginastera.

Besides uniformly good work from the strings and the woodwinds, Kahane's
band came up with individual excellence from cellist Wanda Warkentin,
flutist Kathleen Lane Reynolds, clarinetist Roy Zajac, and oboist Barbara
Midney.  I wish the journey to Santa Rosa could be all in the win column,
but the performances from the soloists in the Mozart fell short of that.

The orchestra's concertmaster and principal violist, Joseph Edelberg
and Linda Ghidossi-De Luca, were also featured a few months ago in the
same work with another orchestra, and they have come a long way since,
but Edelberg's dry, rigid interpretation, and the violist's clipped,
non-singing sound (often marching to her own tempi) just don't add up
to the quality and promise of the rest of the evening.

There is one more aspect of the Kahane ascendancy in Santa Rosa:
his commitment to the community.  He moved his family there, he is
participating in a rich chamber-music program 'round the season, community
concerts, educational programs.  Contradictory as it sounds, digging in
locally is often the secret of success globally.  It may well happen in
this case.

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