The 92nd Street Y, New York to Present Gabriel Kahane & Friends: ONLY LIGHT CAN DO THAT
The event will take place on October 31, 2025 at 7:30PM at Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Oct. 10, 2025
The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) will present Gabriel Kahane & Friends: only light can do that, a 92NY commission, on October 31, 2025 at 7:30PM at Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center, 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY, 10128. Tickets start at $45 and are available now.
Composer and singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane returns to 92NY following his sold-out performance last season. With only light can do that, a new set of songs commissioned by The 92nd Street Y, New York, Gabriel Kahane performs his first full band shows in a decade. This new batch of tunes runs the emotional gamut, reflecting on overlapping political crises, the vicissitudes of parenting, the public utterances of brainworm-addled politicians, and the possibility of loving one's enemies. Featuring a dozen-and-a-half songs filled out by string quartet and rhythm section, this concert offers audiences a first look at new work written by one of our keenest observers of modern life.
Credits:
Gabriel Kahane, voice/piano/guitars/electronics
Chris Morrissey, bass
Josh Dion, drums
David Bernat and Domenic Salerni, violins
Lauren Spaulding, viola
Arlen Hlusko, cello
Gabriel Kahane is a musician, writer, and storyteller. Highlights of the 2025/26 season include collaborations with Roomful of Teeth, Attacca Quartet, and Jeffrey Kahane; conducting debuts with Santa Fe Pro Music and the San Antonio Philharmonic; composer-in-residence posts with the University of Iowa and the Charlotte Symphony; the world premiere of a new set of songs at The 92nd Street Y; and the Carnegie Hall premiere of If love will not swing wide the gates, a clarinet concerto written for Anthony McGill.
An avid theater artist, Kahane opened last season at Playwrights Horizons with the off-Broadway debut of two solo pieces, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, the latter of which chronicled the composer's 8,980-mile railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. His album and stage spectacle, The Ambassador, was produced at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2014, under the direction of Tony winner John Tiffany. A musical, February House, written with the playwright Seth Bockley, received its New York premiere at The Public Theater in 2012. In 2018, Kahane made his Broadway debut with the score for Kenneth Lonergan's play The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May, Lucas Hedges, and Michael Cera.
Kahane is known for tackling politically thorny subject matter in his work with subtlety and grace, perhaps most notably in his orchestral oratorio, emergency shelter intake form, which addresses economic inequality through the lens of homelessness and housing insecurity, and has been heard in London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and beyond. He is also increasingly productive as a writer, with prose appearing in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Via the newsletter "Words and Music," Kahane publishes bi-weekly essays on a variety of topics, all of which can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com.
Kahane's wide-ranging discography includes five albums as a singer-songwriter, several orchestral projects, a disc of chamber music (with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider), as well as various other collaborative albums. He has worked with an array of artists spanning the aesthetic gamut, from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sylvan Esso, Chris Thile, and Sufjan Stevens, to the Danish String Quartet, Caroline Shaw, and Pekka Kuusisto, with whom he plays as the duo Council. The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kahane relocated to Portland, OR in the spring of 2020, where he lives with his family and serves as creative chair of the Oregon Symphony, a post he has held since 2019.
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