SAN ANTONIO — When pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane went public in May 2026 with plans for a new orchestra, Harmonium of Texas, skepticism was inevitable. Given the recent history of symphony orchestras in San Antonio, was Harmonium fueled by hopium?
A definitive answer would be premature, but the new venture is set to give its debut concert Oct. 2 with Kahane conducting Orff’s Carmina Burana and recent works by Gabriela Ortiz and Michael Torke. The orchestra’s website promises an ambitious and unorthodox inaugural season.
Guest artists include cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax, and violinists Joshua Bell and Nancy Zhou. For the 200th anniversary year of Beethoven’s death, a series of eight concerts offers all nine symphonies and the five piano concertos. Several of the Beethoven concerts include 20th- and 21st-century works that relate in some way to Beethoven or the Classical period. Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, with the voices of Roomful of Teeth, opens for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. J. S. Bach gets his due with the complete Brandenburg concertos and St. Matthew Passion.
But music of the past dozen years, and San Antonio’s Hispanic heritage, also receives deserving attention with works by Ortiz, Torke, Andrea Casarrubios (Harmonium’s composer in residence), Mary Kouyoumdjian, Derrick Skye, Clarice Assad, Juan Pablo Contreras, Aoife O’Donovan, Gabriel Kahane (Jeffrey’s son), Carlos Simon, and Enrico Chapela, whose Braceros, a cantata for mariachi and orchestra, shares the season closer with Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. And there’s the obligatory Tchaikovsky Nutcracker, reinterpreted as A Texas Folklorico Story by the San Antonio Youth Ballet.
Kahane conducts 10 of the season’s 19 concerts. He’s the piano soloist in three Beethoven concertos, including the Triple with violinist Elena Urioste and cellist Tommy Mesa, and he collaborates with Ma and Bell. Principal guest conductor Cosette Justo Valdés has one concert. Michael Stern and Stephanie Childress each conduct two Beethoven concerts.
That’s all quite a mouthful for San Antonio, whose philanthropic community has not been conspicuously generous to the performing arts.
Kahane knows what he’s getting into. In April 2024, he was appointed music director of the San Antonio Philharmonic, which had been organized two years earlier by the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony (founded in 1939) after it collapsed. In January 2026, with the Philharmonic clearly following the Symphony on the path to oblivion, Kahane resigned. Like the Symphony, the Philharmonic had everything going for it except adequate financial support, competent governance, and decent ticket sales.
(On Sept. 30, the San Antonio Express-News reported that the Philharmonic had filed suit against Harmonium and Kahane, alleging that the conductor had used the Philharmonic’s donor lists and email marketing lists to help him start Harmonium.)
Kahane had made friends in San Antonio, and they wanted him to stick around. A series of conversations ensued. When he was here for a few days in mid-September, he related the new venture’s origin story.
“Obviously, we were all deeply distressed for the musicians,” said Kahane. “And for the community. And I don’t know who first bruited the idea of just trying to start all over, start from scratch. But when it was brought up, I said, well, I think that would be rather crazy under the circumstances.
“But we kept talking, and I said to myself that if I could raise half a million dollars by the end of May, in three months, that I would take that as a sign that maybe we could make something happen. And we raised nearly that much in less than a month. And by the time we had gotten to the end of May, we were close to a million dollars. We’re now at $1.3 million raised, and several hundred thousand in ticket sales. We’re looking at a budget of roughly $3.2 million for the whole season.”
He insists that number is realistic.
“That’s been very carefully mapped out using spreadsheets. That includes all of the cost of the orchestra, the staff, the guest artists, and so on. So we’re almost 50% of the way. After six months.
“A lot of people have been astounded by it, but I am particularly astounded, and thrilled, and moved by the passion. People have been giving, without hesitation, to an organization that is just, you know, coming from nothing, in a way.”
Donations thus far have come entirely from individuals — none from businesses or local government, which generally demand a track record of two or three years before offering their support.
Kahane bases his optimism in part on the hire of an executive director, Jason Bell.
“Jason is a sixth-generation San Antonian, very interesting guy, who has a very strong background in the arts, started out in theater and film, and then became a business person. And he’s very well connected here. He knows a lot of people.”
Jim Berg, Harmonium’s board chairman, also understands the challenge. He had been a member of the Symphony’s board, and he observed the Philharmonic from a slight distance as a subscriber. In those roles, he learned a thing or two about how not to run an orchestra.
“What not to do,” Berg said, “is to get overextended, over-promise, start thinking that there’s gonna be a savior, a white horse. He’s gonna come over the hill and save you.” He said he’s worn a figurative “caution” sign around his neck since day one. “Bumps ahead. You know?”
Berg said he had emailed Kahane several times after his Philharmonic concerts to praise his work. Kahane didn’t respond to those messages — until after he quit the orchestra.
Berg recalled, “He contacted me and said, ‘This is what I have in mind.’ And I said, ‘Let’s go.’ I could see that, for his timing, what he wanted to do, a lot of things had to happen really quickly.”
Kahane, Berg, and their associates organized Harmonium at (cautiously) breakneck speed. Most orchestras start planning their seasons at least 18 months in advance. Harmonium launched itself publicly with its season announcement on May 19, less than three months after starting work in earnest.
Kahane said the orchestra begins with a roster of 62 musicians. Most of them had played with the San Antonio Symphony or the Philharmonic, and a few others will commute from Austin. Initially, the musicians will be paid per service, with no collective bargaining agreement.
“It has to be,” said Kahane. “There’s no other way to do it. But I made clear to the board from the beginning that our priority was to serve the musicians, and above all, the musicians of San Antonio and environs. We’re hiring one concert set at a time, but we’ve now hired the orchestra all the way through the St. Matthew Passion in February, and we anticipate being able to hire them for the rest of the season.”
Some extraordinary musicians who had played with the Symphony have moved on to other orchestras; principal oboe Paul Lueders, for example, is now acting principal with the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra. Others, such as concertmaster Eric Gratz and principal cello Ken Freudigman, left orchestral life behind altogether.
When the Symphony canceled its 2003-04 season because of one of its several bankruptcies, Freudigman and violist Emily Watkins Freudigman founded a chamber group, Camerata San Antonio, that is still going strong. They returned to the Symphony when it emerged from that bankruptcy, but they will not be playing with Harmonium.
“I made the decision in 2025 to step away from orchestral and focus on chamber music and teaching,” Freudigman said after a recent Camerata concert. “I’m very happy going that direction. It is very fulfilling for me to do that stuff. And just for my peace of mind, both mentally and, frankly, my pocketbook, it was time to step away.”
Recent years have dispensed a double dose of uncertainty to the musicians. In early 2018, the Symphony board announced its intention to suspend operations, but three days later it was rescued by a major gift. The orchestra opened the following season with Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. A few months later, Covid forced a hiatus through the 2020-21 season. Then the Symphony board wanted to cut the orchestra from 71 to 40 players. The musicians declined to lie in that Procrustean bed and went on strike. In June 2022, the Symphony board voted unanimously to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Harmonium will be peripatetic for its first season, and probably beyond. Eight concerts, including the opening and closing events, will be in the 2,300-seat Lila Cockrell Theater, which opened in 1968. The Bach concerts and most of the Beethoven series will be in churches or smaller theaters.
“The focus is on the bigger repertoire, because we want to provide as much work for the musicians as we can,” Kahane said. “But I spent 20 years as the music director of [the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra]. So I’m very deeply immersed in that whole world, both the Baroque and Classical periods.”
A 1,600-seat hall with superb acoustics, the H-E-B Performance Hall in the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts opened in 2014 with the San Antonio Symphony as its resident orchestra. When the symphony died, another organization, The Orchestra San Antonio, jumped into the gap. An outgrowth of after-school and summer educational programs, TOSA is the pit orchestra for the Tobin’s resident ballet and opera companies, but this season it plays only four orchestral programs in the concert hall, plus four chamber music concerts in the Tobin’s studio theatre.
The two organizations are congruent in some ways. Harmonium has established a partnership with Youth Orchestras of San Antonio, a 50-year-old powerhouse with 11 ensembles for ages 8 to 20. Carmina Burana and Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, with Ma as soloist, are to be “side-by-side” performances pairing Harmonium’s pros with YOSA’s student musicians. Many of TOSA’s teaching musicians are products of Venezuela’s widely admired El Sistema music education program.
Harmonium and TOSA both have a strong Hispanic tilt in programming.
“We would love to play in the Tobin,” Kahane said, “but, you know, as wonderful as it is, the reality is that there is an orchestra in residence there, and we’re not interested in horning in on their territory.”
The Cockrell Theatre is acoustically adequate, but the hall with the best potential to rival the Tobin’s sound is the theater at the Scottish Rite Cathedral, which opened in 1924 and shows its age both cosmetically and practically: It’s a nightmare for accessibility. The Philharmonic left its initial home in the First Baptist Church and moved to the Scottish Rite in January 2026. In the inaugural concert, Kahane conducted Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in a performance of blazing power and momentum. The sound was tantalizingly close to magnificent, remaining clean and open even in the most terrifying tutti climaxes.
“I thought that the Scottish Rite was a mistake to go to,” Berg said, “but if you could get in there alive and exit alive, the music inside was superb. That building itself is a musical instrument of the first order. Unfortunately, it’s got lots of pitfalls, which will cost lots of money.”
The hall and the orchestra performed splendidly again in that season’s finale, Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony conducted by Kahane. This resurrection presaged a deep coma, at best. The Philharmonic settled a law suit by two of its early backers and got through just three subscription concerts of the following season when it was evicted from the Scottish Rite for failing to make promised repairs. There has been no word about a 2026-27 season. It might be relevant to note that the Scottish Rite’s architecture was modeled on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
Cognizant that history is not necessarily Harmonium’s friend, Berg focuses on the long game. Gesturing toward the verdant golf course behind his house, he said, “This has been closed for almost 12 months. And they’ve redone all the greens, etc. But it needs to root. And that’s what a symphony needs to do. That’s what any new musical organization needs to do.”
Harmonium, Berg said, needs “to convince San Antonio that we’re here to stay. But only time will tell that. We can’t fast-forward credibility.”
