After record-breaking season, Louisville Orchestra and Teddy Abrams continue statewide In Harmony Tour this summer and release The Year of Silence on Pentatone, featuring music by Christopher Cerrone and Andrew Norman (June 26)
Teddy Abrams conducts Louisville Orchestra (photo: O’Neil Arnold)
(June 2026) — Following a record-breaking 2025–26 season, Music Director Teddy Abrams and the Louisville Orchestra (LO) embark on a summer of free community performances around the state of Kentucky with the In Harmony Tour, the legislative funding for which was recently renewed through 2028. Upcoming tour destinations include Glasgow, Elizabethtown, and Shelbyville (June 25–27), and these free, outdoor, America-themed performances celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary will culminate with a program titled “Play America” at America Place in Jeffersonville, Indiana (July 2). The orchestra also releases a new album on the Pentatone label titled The Year of Silence, comprising the Louisville Orchestra-commissioned title composition by Christopher Cerrone, featuring singer-narrator Dashon Burton, and Andrew Norman’s piano fantasy Split, performed with the LO by dedicatee Jeffrey Kahane. Both works were recorded live in Louisville, Cerrone’s during its 2023 world premiere.
Record-breaking season and In Harmony tour
Under the direction of Teddy Abrams, the Louisville Orchestra has won praise as “one of the most innovative in the United States” (The New York Times). The 2025–26 season saw record audience demand, achieving the highest number of sold-out performances in the organization’s history, fully sold-out Pops Series led by Principal Pops Conductor Bob Bernhardt, and the highest single-ticket revenue for the Classics Series of Teddy Abrams’s twelve seasons as Music Director. The season also saw the orchestra reach more than 75,000 audience members through performances, education programs, and community initiatives. Nearly 50,000 patrons attended paid performances, while more than 13,000 attended free concerts and community programs throughout Louisville and the Commonwealth.
Abrams comments:
“The success of this season reflects the exceptional trust, excitement, and spirit shared between our musicians and our audiences. Kentuckians are showing up in record numbers because they want to be a part of the Louisville Orchestra family, and we have welcomed everyone into that family, regardless of demographics, beliefs, politics, and even musical proclivities. We are an orchestra for and of the people, which suggests a positive cycle of energy: our audience gives us the inspiration to dream bigger, create boldly, and serve Kentucky communities with greater impact than ever before.”
Jordan Harris, Chair of the Louisville Orchestra Board of Directors, adds:
“The Louisville Orchestra is stronger today than at any point in recent memory, and the momentum continues to build. Our musicians are better than ever. Our impact is bigger than ever. Our mission is more central than ever to the cultural life of Louisville and the Commonwealth.”
The groundbreaking In Harmony statewide touring initiative has been a key part of this success, bringing orchestral music directly to 50 counties and 57,000 Kentuckians across the Commonwealth, and the orchestra was recently awarded $3.2 million from the Kentucky General Assembly to continue the In Harmony Tour through 2028. With this new allocation, total support for the program now reaches $11.8 million, making the legislature the largest independent donor in the orchestra’s history. Since launching in 2022, the In Harmony Tour has grown into a nationally recognized model for how public investment in the arts can expand cultural access, strengthen communities, and connect people across an entire state.
Previous iterations of the tour have featured Kentucky artists including Sam Bush, Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper, Tessa Lark, Ben Sollee, and Chris Thile alongside Louisville Orchestra musicians in solo and chamber performances. The tour has also included seven world premieres by composers from the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps, highlighting Kentucky’s role in shaping the future of American music. Looking ahead, the tour will include a special engagement featuring Yo-Yo Ma in 2027.
The Year of Silence on Pentatone
The Year of Silence marks the orchestra’s first commercial release since Abrams won a 2024 Grammy Award for his and the LO’s collaboration with pianist Yuja Wang on her album The American Project. The title composition, The Year of Silence by Christopher Cerrone, was inspired by Kevin Brockmeier’s short story about a city that mysteriously falls silent, a text the composer first encountered in 2010 but only returned to during the early months of the pandemic. What ten years earlier had seemed like a distant, mythic narrative suddenly seemed prophetic, as Cerrone wandered the unusually quiet streets of Brooklyn and rediscovered the story amid the stillness and uncertainty of that time. Choosing to preserve as much of the text as possible, he shaped the work around a narrator who moves between speech and song, specifically having in mind the voice of Dashon Burton, who performs the work on the album. Cerrone comments:
“I used a prepared piano, strings scratching their strings, and brass players blowing air throughout their instruments to turn the orchestra into the noise of a construction site. I asked all the percussion to play freely and ignore the conductor to evoke the sound of Morse code in the distance. The hardest thing to evoke in the music was the silence, which I interpreted not as a literal lack of sound, but as a kind of warm, sustained world that envelops the listener the way the silence does in the story.”
Andrew Norman’s Split was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for pianist Jeffrey Kahane, who performs it with Abrams and the Louisville Orchestra on the new album. Following the 2015 premiere, The New York Times wrote:
“The radical element … is the way Mr. Norman handles time and structure. His feel for storytelling is permeated by ‘nonlinear, narrative-scrambling techniques from cinema, television and video games,’ as he explains on his website. So his music can seem like nonstop quick cuts from one idea to another. This technique could result in pieces that sound crazed, incoherent or gimmicky. But Mr. Norman brings to his work an acute ear for sonority, along with a sure feel for musical architecture. During every teeming, discombobulating moment of “Split,’ you sense a composer in control. So you relax and go along for the ride.”
About the Louisville Orchestra
The Louisville Orchestra was created in 1937 and sprang up in a time of need, just after the Ohio River Great Flood and in the wake of the Great Depression. Robert Whitney was invited to conduct the newly established orchestra, then known as the Louisville Philharmonic, and arrived from Chicago that same year. In forming the ensemble, the goal was to create a new model for the American symphony orchestra, as it was conceived through an ambitious effort that emphasized innovation through the commissioning, performance, and recording of new works by contemporary composers. The Louisville Orchestra garnered international critical acclaim, became the first orchestra to establish a record label, and cemented a place in history for its contributions to contemporary classical music. In its first two decades, the Louisville Orchestra commissioned/recorded up to 52 new works annually and ultimately created 150 vinyl recordings (LPs) of more than 450 works.
The Louisville Orchestra continues to be recognized as a cornerstone of the Louisville performing arts community. Music Director Teddy Abrams has helmed the Louisville Orchestra since 2014, and the Louisville Orchestra has returned to its origins of commissioning new music and recording, having released two albums under the prestigious Decca Gold label, and winning a 2024 Grammy Award for “Best Classical Instrumental Solo” for The American Project on Deutsche Grammophon, featuring the conductor’s own Piano Concerto with its dedicatee and Abrams’s longtime friend and collaborator, Yuja Wang, as soloist. A wide variety of immersive and innovative concert performances and educational programming continue to receive national attention, including the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps, a trailblazing initiative that provides a fully funded residency for three composers who receive local housing, a salary, health benefits and dedicated workspaces; the In Harmony Tour, a multi-season community-building project on a giant scale funded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky – which has currently allocated $4.3 million through 2026 – that takes the orchestra to every corner of the state for concerts and special community events; and the performance of Abrams’s composition 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. Recent press coverage includes a feature story on PBS NewsHour and articles and mentions in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and on CBS Sunday Morning. Accolades include three invitations to perform at Carnegie Hall; the Leonard Bernstein Award for Excellence in Educational Programming; the League of American Orchestras 2019 Ford Musician Awards for Excellence in Community Service; and 19 American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) awards for adventurous programming in use of contemporary music.
Louisville Orchestra and Teddy Abrams: The Year of Silence
Release date: June 26 on Pentatone
Tracklist:
Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984)
The Year of Silence
1) Shortly after two in the afternoon
2) He put the pill bottle back
3) There was another silence
4) Who was the first person
5) The silence was plain and rich and deep
6) Shortly after nine a.m.
7) The cryptographer’s theory
8) Every day the silence receded
Andrew Norman (b. 1979)
9) Split
Dashon Burton, vocalist & narrator (The Year of Silence)
Jeffrey Kahane, piano (Split)
Louisville Orchestra
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Louisville Orchestra and Teddy Abrams: summer 2026
June 25–27
In Harmony Tour
June 25: Glasgow, KY (Glasgow Town Square)
June 26: Elizabethtown, KY (The Bandstand in Freeman Lake Park)
June 27: Shelbyville, KY (Shelby County Fairgrounds)
Repertoire selected from:
SMITH/KEY: “Star-Spangled Banner”
BERNSTEIN: Overture to Candide
DVOŘÁK: Symphony No. 8, Mvt. I
VIEUXTEMPS: Souvenir d’Amérique
GOULD: American Salute
TRADITIONAL/AFRICAN AMERICAN SPIRITUALS (arr. Carrie Lane Gruselle): “Deep River”
JOPLIN: The Entertainer
PRIMA: “Sing, Sing, Sing”
COPLAND: Fanfare for the Common Man
Anthony R. GREEN (Creators Corps): A Love Letter to Scotland, Mvt. II (Evan Vicic, Acting Principal Viola)
GRIEG: In the Hall of the Mountain King
PROKOFIEV: Symphony No. 5, Mvt. IV
P.D.Q. BACH: 1712 Overture
COPLAND: “Hoe-down” From Rodeo
John WILLIAMS: “Main Title” from Star Wars
July 2
Jeffersonville, IN
America Place
“Play America”
SMITH/KEY: “Star-Spangled Banner”
BERNSTEIN: Overture to Candide
DVOŘÁK: Symphony No. 8, Mvt. I
VIEUXTEMPS: Souvenir d’Amérique
Anthony R. GREEN (Creators Corps): A Love Letter to Scotland, Mvt. II (Evan Vicic, Acting Principal Viola)
GRIEG: In the Hall of the Mountain King
PROKOFIEV: Symphony No. 5, Mvt. IV
P.D.Q. BACH: 1712 Overture
COPLAND: “Hoe-down” From Rodeo
John WILLIAMS: “Main Title” from Star Wars
July 4
Frankfort, KY
A Kentucky Celebration – America 250
Featuring The Louisville Orchestra