Teddy Abrams conductor

Teddy Abrams, Grammy Award winner and Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year, has been the galvanizing force behind the Louisville Orchestra (LO)’s artistic renewal since his appointment as Music Director in September 2014.

Following summer performances across Kentucky of the “In Harmony” tour – a multi-season initiative funded by the Commonwealth that takes the orchestra to every corner of the state – Abrams and the LO begin their 2024–25 season with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Louisville Chamber Choir, followed by Ray Chen performing Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, debut works from members of the 2024–25 Creators Corps, Valerie Coleman’s Concerto for Orchestra, and a staged production of Viktor Ullmann’s one-act chamber opera Der Kaiser Von Atlantis. Abrams also continues to be in high demand as a guest conductor, making his conducting debut this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and returning to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he will be joined by pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, as well as the National Symphony Orchestra, Luxembourg Philharmonic, and Curtis Symphony Orchestra.

In April 2023, Abrams premiered his own composition Mammoth with the LO and Yo-Yo Ma in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, and in 2024 his piano concerto for Yuja Wang won a Grammy Award. 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.

“Closing the night was a performance of The Rite of Spring that Abrams set to grooving like a high-brow Eastern European version of roots music, filled as it is with Russian folk tunes that evoke a primeval past both timeless and strangely familiar.” ★★★★

Néstor Castiglione, Bachtrack, August 2024

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“Abrams’s gifts as a conductor were evident at a gala concert in Louisville last month, at the Kentucky Center. He leads with a clear, fluid beat, somewhat in the Tilson Thomas manner.”

Alex Ross, The New Yorker, May 2023

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“Conductor Abrams brings out the best in the orchestra, creating a quicksilver lightness in the string section that is an excellent foil for the soloist’s intensely projecting tone.”

Miranda Wilson, Strings Magazine, March 2020

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“Guest conductor Teddy Abrams exuded powerful authority on the podium. Abrams, using large, forceful gestures, presided over an assertive, propulsive performance of the oft-craggy first movement, which is the wellspring for the melodic material of the subsequent movements.”

Matthew Denis, The Register-Guard, February 2019