Teddy Abrams – Bio – Ojai Music Festival

Grammy Award-winning conductor-composer Teddy Abrams is about to embark on his twelfth season as Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra (LO), the place he has been the galvanizing power behind the ensemble’s extraordinary inventive renewal and progressive social impression. He was chosen as Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year, and his work has been profiled by CBS Sunday Morning, PBS NewsHour, NPR, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, which hails him as a “maestro of the people” who “has embedded himself in his community, breaking the mold of modern conductors.”

Beyond Louisville, Abrams has carried out the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Vancouver, and Phoenix Symphonies; the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Buffalo and Los Angeles Philharmonics; Carnegie Hall’s NYO2; and the Minnesota, Florida, and Sarasota Orchestras, all in North America, in addition to the Helsinki and Luxembourg Philharmonics and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Europe. He returns to the Minnesota Orchestra and makes debuts with the Atlanta Symphony, Nashville Symphony, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, and London’s BBC Symphony Orchestra within the 2025-26 season.

As Musical America observes, “Abrams has put Louisville firmly on the musical map.” Among his manifold achievements in Kentucky are the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps, a trailblazing initiative that gives a totally funded residency for 3 composers who obtain native housing, a wage, well being advantages, and devoted workspaces, and the In Harmony Tour, a multi-season, grand-scale community-building venture funded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Taking the orchestra to all corners of the state for live shows and particular group occasions, this statewide tour has featured performances with Grammy winners Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper, violinist Tessa Lark, and mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile. Highlights of the approaching season embody the world premiere of Lisa Bielawa’s Violin Concerto, a brand new LO fee; an all-Hungarian program showcasing Yuja Wangin Ligeti’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; a gala live performance that includes Itzhak Perlman; new music from the Creators Corps’ fourth season; the continuation of the In Harmony Tour; and performances of Mahler’s epic Ninth Symphony.

Abrams is a prolific and award-winning composer, whose music embraces influences from throughout the stylistic spectrum. He has written quite a few works for the Louisville Orchestra, together with Mammoth, premiered with Yo-Yo Ma and Davóne Tines at Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park; Unified Field, a ballet offered with the Louisville Ballet; a fanfare for the then-Prince Charles, to commemorate the longer term king’s go to to Louisville; and a piano concerto for Yuja Wang, which they recorded for The American Project, the Deutsche Grammophon album that gained the pianist and himself a Grammy Award. Other recordings of Abrams’s music embody his personal interpretation of Preludes, his piano assortment impressed by Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, which was launched by New Amsterdam Records in 2025. Abrams is at the moment engaged on an orchestral illustration of Kentucky’s historical past and tradition as a part of his Emerson Collective Fellowship, which acknowledges his contributions to constructing area people by music. Intended for efficiency by the LO, the brand new work attracts on the group classes he holds throughout the state, for music-making, storytelling, and sharing native historical past with fellow Kentuckians. He can also be at work on ALI, a brand new Broadway musical about boxing legend and activist Muhammad Ali. Abrams first started exploring Ali’s life and legacy in 2016, and the LO premiered his rap opera, The Greatest: Muhammad Ali, the next yr. The all-star forged featured Rhiannon Giddens, Jubilant Sykes, and activist-musician Jecorey “1200” Arthur, now one in all Louisville’s Metro councilmen, with whom Abrams went on to discovered the Louisville Orchestra Rap School.

The rap opera is simply one of many adventurous collaborations Abrams has initiated with outstanding Louisville locals. He and the LO not too long ago joined Jack Harlow for back-to-back performances of the Billboard Music Award-winning rapper’s biggest hits. With Jim James, the vocalist and guitarist for My Morning Jacket, Abrams composed the music cycle The Order of Nature, which they premiered with the LO, reprised with the National Symphony Orchestra at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center, and recorded for 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, additionally for launch on Decca Gold.

In a brand new, season-long function because the Aspen Institute Arts Program’s 2025-26 Harman/Eisner Artist-in-Residence, Abrams will supply his inventive imaginative and prescient to coverage packages, occasions, management actions, and extra in Aspen, New York, Washington D.C., and elsewhere. In summer season 2023, he concluded his decade-long tenure as Music Director and Conductor of Oregon’s Britt Festival Orchestra. As properly as helming its annual three-week competition of live shows, he led the orchestra on tour within the Pacific Northwest with new works together with Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw’s experiential Brush, written for his or her summer season 2021 performances on the Jacksonville Woodlands Trail system; and Michael Gordon’s Natural History. Their world premiere efficiency of Gordon’s work, offered in partnership with the National Park Service on the fringe of Crater Lake National Park, was the topic of the PBS documentary Symphony for Nature. Abrams beforehand served as Assistant Conductor of the Detroit Symphony (2012–14), as Resident Conductor of Hungary’s MAV Symphony Orchestra (2011–12), and as Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor of Miami’s New World Symphony (2008–11).

Visit Teddy Abrams’ Website