There's a version of this concert that belongs entirely to Roomful of Teeth — the a cappella sequence from Peter Shin's Bits Torn From Words was, by the reviewer's own admission, the evening's most arresting music. Syllables pulsed around the semicircle of singers, Cameron Beauchamp's bass notes generating overtones that skittered up the harmonic series, raw vibrance alternating with sine-wave purity. It was technically extraordinary. And then you walked out humming Kahane. Elevator Songs, written for Roomful of Teeth in 2023, is structured around a wormhole hotel where the elevator — announced by chimes — delivers passengers to parallel worlds. The conceit is whimsical but load-bearing: it licenses tonal lurches between grief, divorce, operatic absurdism, and 1980s soul without the seams showing. The format sits somewhere between concept album and song cycle, which is precisely the gap Kahane has made his territory. The comedic numbers landed hardest on the night. Thann Scoggin's hot-tub confrontation — a paranoid drunk interrupts a spa session, set as quasi-operatic duet in Bergian style — is the kind of idea that sounds like a bad joke until it works completely. Holcombe Waller's influencer monologue on cabin baggage, sliding from spoken word into soul choruses, demonstrated Kahane's real skill: the ability to make formally ambitious music feel like a perfect disposable pop song without condescending to either register. Before Elevator Songs, Kahane performed solo: songs from the Book of Travelers, his cross-continental rail-trip response to a fractured America, and one of the Craigslistlieder — a personal ad set in severe Bartókian style. These established the range. Kahane is a songwriter who has read Bartók and Schubert and doesn't hide it, but the songs are still songs. The melancholy is real, not performed. What the evening illustrated is a genuine tension in contemporary composed-song writing: technical virtuosity (Roomful of Teeth's a cappella work) and popular memorability (Kahane's earworms) rarely coexist in the same concert hall, let alone the same piece. Elevator Songs attempts the coexistence. That it doesn't fully resolve the tension is almost beside the point — the attempt itself is more interesting than most work that doesn't try. Kahane is touring this while also presenting a clarinet concerto at the Proms and a duo project with Pekka Kuusisto. The breadth is either restless ambition or a refusal to be categorized. Based on the evidence here, probably both.
