Teddy Abrams (Composer). Named Grammy Award winner and Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year, Abrams has been the galvanizing force behind the Louisville Orchestra’s 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.

Abrams first began exploring Ali’s life and legacy in 2016, and the Louisville Orchestra 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.

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.”

In the 2024–25 season, Abrams makes his conducting debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Luxembourg Philharmonic, and Curtis Symphony Orchestra.

A prolific and award-winning composer, 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. 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.