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 achievements in Kentucky are the Louisville Orchestra Creator’s Corps, which 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 project funded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky and taking the orchestra to every corner of the state for concerts and special community events. 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.

Abrams makes his conducting debut this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Luxembourg Philharmonic, and Curtis Symphony Orchestra.

An award-winning composer, in April 2023 Abrams premiered his own Mammoth with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and the LO in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. Other recent compositions include a piano concerto for Yuja Wang, with which he and the Louisville Orchestra made their Deutsche Grammophon debuts on her Grammy-winning March 2023 release, The American Project; and Space Variations, composed for Universal Music Group’s 2022 World Sleep Day. Abrams is now at work on ALI, a musical about Muhammad Ali; and—as part of the Emerson Collective Fellowship—an orchestral work that tells the story of the state of Kentucky, to premiere in the 2025–26 season.