Teddy Abrams

Teddy Abrams, Grammy Award winner and Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year, has been the galvanizing force behind the Louisville Orchestra’s (LO) extraordinary artistic renewal and innovative social impact since his appointment as Music Director in September 2014. His work has been profiled by CBS Sunday Morning, the New Yorker, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and PBS NewsHour.

Among Abrams’s manifold achievements in Kentucky are the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps, a trailblazing initiative that provides a fully funded residency for three composers who receive local housing, a salary, health benefits and dedicated workspaces; and the “In Harmony” tour, a multi-season community-building project on a giant scale funded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky that takes the orchestra to every corner of the state for concerts and special community events. This statewide touring has included featured performances with Grammy Award winners Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper, mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, and violinist Tessa Lark. Deemed by the New York Times as a “Maestro of the People,” Abrams “has embedded himself in his community, breaking the mold of modern conductors.”

Abrams’s 2024–25 season with the Louisville Orchestra includes Carl Orff’s monumental Carmina Burana, Ray Chen performing Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, and Valerie Coleman’s Concerto for Orchestra. The spring includes world premieres of works from the third round of composers participating in the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps.

This season, Abrams makes his debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with return guest conductor appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, and Curtis Symphony Orchestra. This past summer, Abrams returned to the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the second consecutive year and conducted NYO2 at Carnegie Hall’s World Orchestra Week! (WOW!). In North America, Abrams has conducted the Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Vancouver, and Phoenix Symphonies; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Buffalo Philharmonic; and the Minnesota, Florida, and Sarasota Orchestras. Internationally, Abrams has conducted the Helsinki Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and Luxembourg Philharmonic.

A prolific and award-winning composer himself, Abrams – as part of the Emerson Collective Fellowship – will compose an orchestral work to premiere in the Louisville Orchestra’s 2025–26 season that tells the story of the state of Kentucky. The raw material for the piece will come from community sessions Abrams leads on visits around the state: time spent with Kentuckians music-making, storytelling, and sharing local history.

Recent compositional highlights include Mammoth, an immersive theater work inspired by and performed in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park in 2023 with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and a cast of local musicians. Other recent works include a piano concerto written for Abrams’s frequent collaborator Yuja Wang, with which he and the Louisville Orchestra made their Deutsche Grammophon debuts on the virtuoso pianist’s Grammy award-winning March 2023 release, The American Project; and Space Variations, a collection of three new pieces for Universal Music Group’s 2022 World Sleep Day. Abrams is now at work on ALI, a new Broadway musical about boxing legend and activist Muhammad Ali. Abrams first began exploring Ali’s life and legacy in 2016, and the LO premiered his rap opera, The Greatest: Muhammad Ali, the following year. The all-star cast featured Rhiannon Giddens, Jubilant Sykes, and activist-musician Jecorey “1200” Arthur, now one of Louisville’s Metro councilmen, with whom Abrams went on to found the Louisville Orchestra Rap School.

The rap opera is just one of the adventurous collaborations Abrams has initiated in Louisville, in addition to the “In Harmony" tour and Creators Corps. With Jim James, vocalist and guitarist for My Morning Jacket, he composed the song cycle The Order of Nature, which they premiered with the Louisville Orchestra and reprised with the National Symphony Orchestra at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center before recording it on Decca Gold. Similarly, with singer-songwriter Storm Large, Abrams and the LO recorded All In, a celebration of American music by Cole Porter, Aaron Copland, and Abrams and Large themselves, also for release on Decca Gold.

Abrams and the LO are the recipients of a one-of-a-kind, sculptural conductor’s rail and podium from Ireland’s Joseph Walsh Studio. Completed in September 2023, the ash stage-piece was created expressly for Abrams and the orchestra and is used during all of their performances together.

In summer 2023, Abrams concluded his decade-long tenure as Music Director and Conductor of Oregon’s Britt Festival Orchestra. As well as helming its annual three-week festival of concerts, he led the orchestra on tour in the Pacific Northwest with new works including Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw’s experiential Brush, written for their summer 2021 performances on the Jacksonville Woodlands Trail system; and Michael Gordon’s Natural History. Their world premiere performance of Gordon’s work, presented in partnership with the National Park Service at the edge of Crater Lake National Park, was the subject of the PBS documentary Symphony for Nature.

Abrams served as Assistant Conductor of the Detroit Symphony (2012–14), as Resident Conductor of Hungary’s MAV Symphony Orchestra (2011-2012), and as Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor of the New World Symphony (2008–11).