Conductor Teddy Abrams rekindles a tradition of innovation in Louisville

While Teddy Abrams can certainly deliver an adroit interpretation of Beethoven or Brahms, the intrepid California-born conductor has made a name for himself as a musical adventurer. Like Marin Alsop, Alan Gilbert or Esa Pekka-Salonen, he likes to experiment with formats and venues and develop themed, socially conscious festivals, all while discovering new composers and rediscovering forgotten ones from the past.

His inventiveness has paid off; he was named Musical America’s 2022 conductor of the year. “I was very surprised and thrilled, of course, and really honored,” said Abrams, 36. But he is quick to point out that the award wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the musicians and staff of the Louisville Orchestra, where he has served as music director since 2014, and the support of its audiences.

“For me, it’s a shared honor,” he said. “As much as I’m proud to have spearheaded and maybe instigated a lot of the stuff we’ve had, it’s due to a lot of people believing in that vision and making it happen. We do have an all-star team there.”

Abrams will return Aug. 10 for his second Ravinia Festival appearance, leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a program bearing some of the hallmarks of his conducting philosophy. The centerpiece is Heirloom, a 30-minute concerto for piano and chamber orchestra written by composer Gabriel Kahane as a tribute to his father, Jeffrey, the famed classical pianist.

Abrams is good friends with Gabriel Kahane, who, like the conductor, also traverses pop music, musical theater and classical music. Jeffrey Kahane and the Kansas City Symphony premiered the work in 2021. The Ravinia concert will be one of the first performances by an ensemble outside its original group of six co-commissioners. While premieres are important, Abrams said, it’s also essential to perform worthy recent works and see if they have staying power. “I’m really excited that we’re going to establish this piece,” he said. “I think it absolutely deserves to be part of the standard repertoire.”

Also on the program is a work by TJ Cole, who took part in the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps program, which brings three composers each year to live in the city and work full time with the orchestra. “There is a very serious level of invention with their music,” said of Cole, who uses the pronouns they/them. “It’s incredibly creative and playful and deeply imaginative.” Featured will be Cole’s six-minute work, Megalopolis (2013). Rounding out the lineup is Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, written in 1944 as World War II raged around him.

Rather than musical abstractions, each of these three works has a clear subtext: Megalopolis addresses the energy and mechanization of the urban environment, Heirloom offers what Gabriel Kahane calls an “aural family scrapbook,” and Symphony No. 5 reflects the tumultuous context of its creation.

“I don’t want to do anything differently just for the sake of trying to stand out. But the institution of the orchestra has so much potential to matter in society today in ways and expressions that are often not developed.” — Teddy Abrams

The Louisville Orchestra has a tradition of musical innovation that dates to 1948, when music director Robert Whitney and the city’s mayor, Charles Farnsley, devised a plan to boost the ensemble’s recognition by commissioning and recording new works. It became the first orchestra to create its own label, First Edition Records. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, it recorded nearly 150 albums with more than 450 works by living composers, including Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, Witold Lutoslawski, Darius Milhaud, William Schuman and Heitor Villa-Lobos. The resulting records were sold worldwide, helping the orchestra build a much larger profile than most ensembles its size.

Decades later, its fortunes reversed. After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2010 and then reorganizing, the orchestra wanted to rekindle some of the energy and excitement generated by the First Edition recording project. It hired Abrams, then a former assistant conductor of the Detroit Symphony, who was just 27. 

Among his first moves was to re-establish the orchestra’s once-annual Festival of American Music, which focused on music by primarily contemporary composers working in the United States. In 2022-23, he spearheaded the Creators Corps with a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. Abrams saw the program as way to tie the orchestra even more closely to the community by having composers move to Louisville and write music there in response to that specific geographical and social milieu. “This is music that’s been built in Louisville by people in Louisville,” he said. This approach, he pointed out, is similar to what occurred centuries ago, when composers like J.S. Bach and Joseph Haydn were hired to collaborate with a regular group of musicians and write music for a set audience. 

In another unusual venture, the orchestra has launched In Harmony: The Commonwealth Tour of the Louisville Orchestra, a two-year initiative to bring the group to towns across Kentucky, with concerts and accompanying outreach activities. It began in May with visits to Prestonburg, Pikeville and Harlan. Joining the orchestra for parts of the tour are two famed soloists who are also Kentucky natives: violinist Tessa Lark and mandolinist Chris Thile, who will showcase a new concerto for his instrument. The project has been funded by a $4.3 million grant from the Kentucky legislature.

“I don’t want to do anything differently just for the sake of trying to stand out or be different in and of itself,” Abrams said. “I don’t think that is a good reason to motivate or propel change. But the institution of the orchestra has so much potential to matter in society today in ways and expressions that are often not developed.”

Abrams sees a symphony orchestra as a service organization with a role in society that far exceeds the concert hall — a powerful collective that can articulate and disseminate ideas and bring members of a community together. “The power of music as a foundational method of communication and a system for finding common ground is so much more powerful than what happens simply in performance,” he said.

If an orchestra approaches its mission by following the routine and simply filling slots on its season schedule, Abrams believes it limits itself. Building programs with the notion of public service, however, can take an orchestra in new, unexpected and exciting directions. Such an approach also helped orchestras reconnect with the role of music in the 18th and 19th centuries and earlier when it played a critical role in what he called the “social cohesion” of cities like Vienna and Paris.

Taking such an approach allows orchestras to both embrace their past and look to the future. “The problem is when people get stuck in one thing or the other,” he said, “like there is some kind of dichotomy or that they are opposing philosophies, which I don’t think they are at all.”

Coming up on his 10th season with the Louisville Orchestra, Abrams has no plans to leave. At the same time, he knows that leadership comes in cycles and wants to be sensitive to the reality that a time will come for a new music director. When it does, he wants to go where he is needed and wanted — which might not necessarily be another symphony orchestra. He is also a noted composer, and he is working on a Broadway musical about boxer, activist and humanitarian Muhammad Ali, a Louisville native. It’s something he never expected to do but is really enjoying.

“I recognize that some of the things I talk about may be quite different, and they’re perhaps even seen as radical, even though I think they are straightforward,” he said. “The reality is that down the road, I will probably be in some place that is totally aligned and compatible [with my point of view], and the time will be right.”

“For now, Louisville is my home, and I love it dearly, dearly.”