Teddy Abrams & Louisville Orchestra Launch Ninth Season Together on Sep 17, Spotlighting New Creators Corps, Statewide Tours, World Premieres & More

Highlights Include Abrams Conducting Emperor Concerto from Keyboard, Festival of American Music Celebrating Leonard Bernstein

Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, home of the Louisville Orchestra (photo: Frankie Steele)
“A pioneering force in new music.”
— Billboard on the Louisville Orchestra

(August 2022)—Now in its ninth season under the dynamic and inspiring leadership of Music Director and Musical America 2022 Conductor of the Year Teddy Abrams, the Louisville Orchestra (LO) celebrates creativity in 2022-23. Highlights of the season include the groundbreaking new Creators Corps program that brings three full-time resident composers to Louisville to create works for the community they’re living in, and the beginning of a statewide touring initiative that expands the orchestra’s central mission of serving its community to the entire Commonwealth of Kentucky. Abrams conducts Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto from the keyboard on a program with the same composer’s Fifth Symphony, and the season’s lineup features many other traditional favorites along with important compositional voices of the present, including 2022 Grawemeyer Award winner Olga Neuwirth, Joel Thompson, Thomas Adès, and Christopher Cerrone. The Festival of American Music focuses on the works of American cultural hero Leonard Bernstein; Abrams conducts the Louisville premiere of the film-in-concert Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of an Orchestra created by Mason Bates; and the season finale features the long-awaited return to the stage of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7. Finally, a stellar array of guest artists including violinists Tessa Lark and Alexi Kenney, LO principal horn Jon Gustely, pianists Timo Andres and Sebastian Chang and baritone Dashon Burton.

Abrams explains:

“We are thrilled to announce our 2022-23 Season, which is filled with all the things that make music such an important part of our lives. It has the energy, and the excitement, and the new, but it also has the affirming – music that is powerful and creative. Creativity is what this season is all about. Along with all the music that we know and love, including masterpieces of Beethoven, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Schumann, we have put a focus on music that speaks to our lives today. The highlight of the season for me is the launch of the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps. This innovative and unique program is a creative catalyst for our whole community. The music of these composers will be featured in our Festival of American Music alongside two brilliant symphonies by an American hero, Leonard Bernstein. We can’t wait to get started on this huge season just packed with incredible music.”

For a video introduction to the season, click here.

Opening night and Creators Corps

From the beginning of his tenure as Music Director, Abrams has envisioned the Louisville Orchestra as an artistic home inclusive of the entire population of the city, a vision that was highlighted by Musical America in naming him Conductor of the Year for 2022. A key element in making this dream a reality is artist-driven civic leadership, perfectly exemplified by the orchestra’s groundbreaking Creators Corps initiative launching this season. The unique residency program brings three composers to live in Louisville’s Shelby Park neighborhood for at least 30 weeks, serving as staff members with an annual salary of $40,000, health insurance, housing, and a custom-built studio workspace. Throughout their residencies, the creators will compose new works to be performed by the orchestra, participate in educational and community engagement activities, and be active, engaged citizens of their neighborhood.

The first new compositions from the Creators Corps are slated to be premiered in January 2023, but each of the three composers inaugurating the program – Lisa Bielawa, TJ Cole and Tyler Taylor – will have one of their preexisting works performed in the orchestra’s opening night concert, “Swing, Swagger and Sway” (Sep 17). Conducted by Abrams, the program bookends these three works with Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto performed by Avery Fisher Career Grant winner Tessa Lark and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. All five pieces – though just the third movement of the Stravinsky – will also be performed the previous day in the 11am Coffee Series (Sep 16).

World premieres of new works by the Creators Corps composers during the 2022-23 season will be performed in the Classics Series concert “Fifths of Beethoven” (Jan 14), as well in both concerts in the Festival of American Music (March 4 and March 11; see below for more details).

Teddy Talks Schumann & Conducts Beethoven’s “Emperor” from the Keyboard

As the Wall Street Journal observed, “[Abrams’s] greatest gift may be his beguiling persona, equal parts civic cheerleader, modest self-promoter and earnest, if affable, pedagogue. … [He] has the rare gift of being able to connect in a meaningful way with just about anyone he meets, even as he speaks to peers, patrons and mentors with penetrating intelligence.” The popular “Teddy Talks…” series exploits Abrams’s strengths as both a conductor and pedagogue, focusing this season on Schumann’s Fourth Symphony (Oct 15). The lecture-concerts in the series – reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein’s wildly successful Omnibus programs in the 1950s – provide the audience with a window into the mind of the composer, as Abrams entertainingly deconstructs the music before reassembling it in a full performance after an intermission. The program will be presented the previous day in both an 11am Coffee Series concert and in the new “Nightlites at the Ogle” series in New Albany, Indiana, at Indiana University Southeast’s Paul W. Ogle Center (Oct 14).

Abrams also conducts the orchestra in another notable educational project this season, the Louisville premiere of the film-in-concert Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra. This 25-minute concerto for orchestra and animated film, scored by composer and DJ Mason Bates in collaboration with Oscar-winning director and sound designer Gary Rydstrom and animator Jim Capobianco, features a magical sprite flying through the instruments of the orchestra, with an imaginative blend of traditional and modern animation styles. By the film’s end, the orchestra overcomes its differences to demonstrate “unity from diversity” in a spectacular finale. The family-friendly program will be presented in matinee and evening performances on the same day (Nov 12).

In 2017, when Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was the subject of the annual “Teddy Talks…” program, Arts-Louisville found that the conductor made “a good case against the decline of classical music,” leaving the critic “absolutely enthralled.” Now the orchestra turns its attention to Beethoven’s “Fifths”: the Fifth Symphony on a program with the Fifth “Emperor” Piano Concerto, which Abrams himself will perform and conduct from the keyboard (Jan 14). Between the Beethoven works, the orchestra will premiere the first of the newly commissioned works from one of the Creators Corps composers. The Beethoven pieces alone will be performed the previous day in an 11am Coffee Series concert (Jan 13).

Festival of American Music: Leonard Bernstein

The Louisville Orchestra has long been inspired by the legacy of Leonard Bernstein. The orchestra’s honors include the Leonard Bernstein Award for Excellence in Educational Programming; powerhouse performances of the composer’s monumental MASS launched the 2015-16 season; the 2018 opening-night concert celebrated the trailblazing American master’s centenary year; and Departures magazine even found that Abrams’s “gifts as an educator and sense of civic responsibility are reminiscent of his hero, Leonard Bernstein.” This season Bernstein provides the focus for the orchestra’s annual two-concert Festival of American Music.

The first of the festival’s programs, titled “Journeys of Faith,” pairs Bernstein’s Third Symphony, “Kaddish,” with Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s Masaot/Clocks Without Hands, inspired by the multiethnic origins of her refugee grandfather, who grew up on the border between Croatia and Hungary in a time of frequently shifting borders and politics. Bernstein dedicated his symphony, published in 1963 and subtitled after the Jewish prayer for the dead, to the memory of John F. Kennedy, and wrote the text of the narration himself. Also on this program will be the second newly commissioned world premiere by a composer from the Creators Corps (March 4).

The second program of the festival – titled “The Literary Influence” – ties in with an initiative begun last season to explore the commonalities between Black and Jewish music, funded by a four-year grant from the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence (JHFE). Bernstein was well-known for his social activism and dedication to civil rights, and in this program his Second Symphony, “The Age of Anxiety,” titled after a poem of the same name by W. H. Auden, is paired with Joel Thompson’s To Awaken the Sleeper, based on the writings of James Baldwin (March 11). Again, the program will feature a world premiere commission from one of the Creators Corps composers. The same program, minus the world premiere, will be performed the previous day in an 11am Coffee Series concert (March 10).

Season finale

The orchestra’s season finale program is built around Bruckner’s monumental Seventh Symphony, one of two Bruckner symphonies on BBC Music Magazine’s list of the 20 greatest symphonies of all time (May 13). The performance marks not only the first time the orchestra has played the work in more than two decades but the first time any Bruckner has been conducted by Abrams during his tenure as Music Director. The program, titled “From Silence to Splendor,” also includes the Louisville Orchestra co-commission A Year of Silence by multi-Grammy nominee Christopher Cerrone, a reflection on the COVID lockdown featuring bass-baritone Dashon Burton and adapted from Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Year of Silence.” The same program will be performed the previous day in the 11am Coffee Series (May 12).

Rounding out the Classics Series

Three of the concerts in the Classics series feature guest conductors. “Tchaikovsky’s 4th” (Nov 19) will be led by Ruth Reinhardt, a former student of Alan Gilbert who served for two seasons as Assistant Conductor of the Dallas Symphony and makes a host of debuts this season both in the U.S. and Europe, including with the New York Philharmonic. Joining her for Thomas Adès’s creation-themed piano concerto, In Seven Days, is Grammy-nominated pianist Timo Andres, also one of the foremost composers of his generation and a tireless collaborator with a wide variety of composing and performing colleagues. Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony—the first of the composer’s symphonies to contain strongly autobiographical and psychological elements—is contrasted with his contemporary Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, as arranged by a third iconic Russian composer of the same generation, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Reinhardt will conduct the two Russian pieces the previous evening in the “Nightlites at the Ogle” series at Indiana University Southeast (Nov 18).

Abrams’s longtime friend Alasdair Neale, Music Director of the New Haven Symphony since just before the pandemic and of the Sun Valley Music Festival for almost three decades, makes his Louisville Orchestra debut with a program titled “The Gilded Age in Paris and Vienna,” featuring the music of Richard Strauss and Maurice Ravel (Feb 4). Louisville Orchestra principal horn Jon Gustely joins Neale for the first of Richard Strauss’s two Horn Concertos, and the program is completed by the Suite from the same composer’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, along with Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose Suite) and Valses nobles et sentimentales. Neale conducts the same program, minus the Mother Goose Suite, the previous day in the 11am Coffee Series (Feb 3).

Fast-rising German conductor Christian Reif, another of Gilbert’s former students and former Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, is joined by violinist Alexi Kenney, about whom the New York Times raved: “he made it seem … as if this were the only possible way to play the music.” Kenney performs Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto on a program with recently deceased Serbian composer Isidora Žebeljan’s Hum away, Hum away, strings! and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 (April 1). Reif will conduct the Bartók concerto and Rachmaninoff symphony the previous evening in the “Nightlites at the Ogle” series at Indiana University South (March 31).

The Louisville Orchestra’s Classics Series is made possible by the generous support of the Brown-Forman Foundation. The Louisville Orchestra Coffee Series is made possible by the generous support of the Baird Company.

Statewide Touring Program and Music Without Borders Series

This past spring, the Louisville Orchestra received a $4.3M appropriation from the Kentucky General Assembly to resume an annual statewide touring program. This unprecedented commitment from the state allows the orchestra to visit every region of the Commonwealth of Kentucky over two years, beginning in 2022. The statewide project launches a new era of deep community partnerships reflecting the character and interests of each town on the tour, fulfilling the orchestra’s dedication to building creative communities with performances, shared music-making, and artistic partnerships in cities and towns across Kentucky. Participation in all touring activities, including tickets to all performances, will be free.

The Music Without Borders series has similar aims for the orchestra’s immediately surrounding community, in recognition of which, starting this season, all concerts in the series will now be free, removing all economic barriers to the enjoyment of the essential public service that the Louisville Orchestra represents. Conceived to take the orchestra and Abrams’s creative programming into non-traditional venues outside the concert hall, this new iteration of the Music Without Borders Series will emphasize repeated appearances by the orchestra in selected neighborhoods at least every three months throughout performance seasons, bringing the full range of orchestral music to populations seeking creative enrichment and a place to gather and share in culture. The neighborhoods chosen for these engagements will reflect the diverse range of Louisville’s residents.

The Music Without Borders series opens the 2022-23 season with a pair of outdoor performances at Iroquois Amphitheater (Sep 10) and Shawnee Park (Sep 11) under the baton of Rei Hotoda, the Music Director of the Fresno Philharmonic called “an inexhaustible dynamo” by Spokane’s Spokesman-Review. Pianist Lara Downes, praised by the New York Times for her “luscious, moody and dreamy artistry,” joins the conductor for Paola Prestini’s 2021 piano concerto, Let Me See the Sun, composed for her, as well as Gershwin’s perennial favorite Rhapsody in Blue, on a program with music by Adolphus Hailstork, Bernstein, Copland, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, John Williams and Arturo Márquez.

The remaining three concerts in the series will be performed in three venues each: The Jeffersonian in Jeffersontown, the Logan Street Market in Shelby Park, and the California Community Center in California Park. In October, Abrams conducts Sibelius’s Finlandia, Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, and Fictional Migrations by Creators Corps member Lisa Bielawa (Oct 27–29). In February, Louisville Orchestra concertmaster Gabriel Lefkowitz conducts Schubert’s Fifth Symphony and Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe (Feb 16–18). Finally, Kelly Corcoran, who conducted the Nashville Symphony for nine seasons, conducts Bernstein’s Overture to West Side Story; Copland’s The Tender Land Suite; and a work by Creators Corps member TJ Cole (March 23–25).

For a complete schedule of the Louisville Orchestra’s 2022-23 season, visit: https://louisvilleorchestra.org/

About the Louisville Orchestra

Established in 1937 through the combined efforts of Louisville mayor Charles Farnsley and conductor Robert Whitney, the Louisville Orchestra is a cornerstone of the Louisville arts community. With the launch of First Edition Recordings in 1947, it became the first American orchestra to own a recording label. Six years later it received a Rockefeller grant of $500,000 to commission, record, and premiere music by living composers, thereby earning a place on the international circuit. In 2001, the Louisville Orchestra received the Leonard Bernstein Award for Excellence in Educational Programming, presented annually to a North American orchestra. Continuing its commitment to new music, the Louisville Orchestra has earned 19 ASCAP awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, and was also awarded large grants from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the National Endowment for the Arts, both for the purpose of producing, manufacturing and marketing its historic First Edition Recordings collections. Over the years, the orchestra has performed for prestigious events at the White House, Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and on tour in Mexico City, and their last two albums for the Decca Gold label, All In (2017) and The Order of Nature (2019) – the latter launched with an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – both topped the Billboard Classical and Crossover charts. The feature-length, Gramophone Award-winning documentary Music Makes a City (2010) chronicles the Louisville Orchestra’s founding years, and in spring 2018, Teddy Abrams and the orchestra were profiled on the popular television program CBS Sunday Morning.

High-resolution photos are available here.

www.louisvilleorchestra.org
www.facebook.com/pages/The-Louisville-Orchestra
twitter.com/louorch

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Louisville Orchestra: 2022-23 Classics, Music Without Borders, and Coffee Series (Pops, Family, Nightlites at the Ogle)

Except where noted, all concerts take place at 7:30pm at the Kentucky Center for the Arts

Sep 10 & 11
Music Without Borders Series
Rei Hotoda, conductor
Lara Downes, piano
Adolphus HAILSTORK: American Fanfare
BERNSTEIN: Candide Overture
COPLAND: Variations on a Shaker Melody
Paola PRESTINI: Hindsight: Let me See the Sun
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR: “Danse Nègre” from African Suite
John WILLIAMS: Superman March
John WILLIAMS: “With Malice Toward None” from Lincoln
Arturo MÁRQUEZ: Conga del Fuego Nuevo
GERSHWIN:  Rhapsody in Blue
     Sep 10: Iroquois Amphitheater
Sep 11: Shawnee Park

Sep 16 at 11am
Coffee Series
“Swing, Swagger and Sway”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Tessa Lark, violin
STRAVINSKY: Symphony in Three Movements, mvmt 3
Tyler TAYLOR: Facades
Lisa BIELAWA: Drama/Self-Pity
TJ COLE: Megalopolis
Wynton MARSALIS: Violin Concerto in D

Sep 17
Classics Series
“Swing, Swagger and Sway”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Tessa Lark, violin
Wynton MARSALIS: Violin Concerto in D
Tyler TAYLOR: Facades
Lisa BIELAWA: Drama/Self-Pity
TJ COLE: Megalopolis
STRAVINSKY: Symphony in Three Movements

Oct 14 at 11am
Coffee Series
“Teddy Talks Schumann”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 4

Oct 14
New Albany, IN
Paul W. Ogle Center at Indiana University Southeast
Nightlites at the Ogle Series
“Teddy Talks Schumann”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 4

Oct 15
Classics Series
“Teddy Talks Schumann”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 4

Oct 27–29
Music Without Borders Series
Teddy Abrams, conductor
SIBELIUS: Finlandia
Lisa BIELAWA:  Fictional Migrations
SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 9
Oct 27: The Jeffersonian
Oct 28: Logan Street Market
Oct 29: California Community Center

Nov 12 at 11am & 7:30pm
Family Series
Old Forester’s Paristown Hall
“Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Mason Bates, composer
Gary Rydstrom, director and sound designer
Jim Capobianco, animator

Nov 18
New Albany, IN
Paul W. Ogle Center at Indiana University Southeast
Nightlites at the Ogle Series
“Tchaikovsky’s 4th”
Ruth Reinhardt, conductor
MUSSORGSKY (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov): Night on Bald Mountain
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 4

Nov 19
Classics Series
“Tchaikovsky’s 4th”
Ruth Reinhardt, conductor
Timo Andres, piano
MUSSORGSKY (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov): Night on Bald Mountain
Thomas ADÈS: In Seven Days, Op. 25
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 4

Dec 2
New Albany, IN
Paul W. Ogle Center at Indiana University Southeast
Nightlites at the Ogle Series
“Handel’s Messiah”
Kent Hatteberg, conductor and chorusmaster
Louisville Chamber Choir
HANDEL: Messiah

Jan 13 at 11am
Coffee Series
“Fifths of Beethoven”
Teddy Abrams, conductor & piano
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 5

Jan 14
Classics Series
“Fifths of Beethoven”
Teddy Abrams, conductor & piano
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”
A World Premiere Piece commissioned from the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 5

Feb 3 at 11am
Coffee Series
“The Gilded Age in Paris and Vienna”
Alasdair Neale, conductor
Jon Gustely, horn
STRAUSS: Horn Concerto No. 1
RAVEL: Valses nobles et sentimentales
STRAUSS: Suite from Der Rosenkavalier

Feb 4
Classics Series
“The Gilded Age in Paris and Vienna”
Alasdair Neale, conductor
Jon Gustely, horn
STRAUSS: Horn Concerto No. 1
RAVEL: Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose Suite)
RAVEL: Valses nobles et sentimentales
STRAUSS: Suite from Der Rosenkavalier

Feb 16–18
Music Without Borders Series
Gabriel Lefkowitz, conductor
BACH:  Concerto for Violin and Oboe
SCHUBERT:  Symphony No. 5
Feb 16: The Jeffersonian
Feb 17: Logan Street Market
Feb 18: California Community Center

March 4
Classics Series
“Festival of American Music 1: Journeys of Faith”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Louisville Chamber Choir
World premiere commissioned from the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps
Olga NEUWIRTH: Masaot/Clocks Without Hands
BERNSTEIN: Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish”

March 10 at 11am
Coffee Series
“Festival of America Music 2: Literary Influences”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Sebastian Chang, piano
Joel THOMPSON: To Awaken The Sleeper (LO co-commission)
BERNSTEIN: Symphony No. 2, “The Age of Anxiety”

March 11
Classics Series
“Festival of American Music 2: The Literary Influence”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Sebastian Chang, piano
Joel THOMPSON: To Awaken the Sleeper (LO co-commission)
World premiere commissioned from the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps
BERNSTEIN: Symphony No. 2, “The Age of Anxiety”

March 23–25
Music Without Borders Series
Kelly Corcoran, conductor
BERNSTEIN: Overture to West Side Story
TJ COLE: TBD
COPLAND: Suite from The Tender Land
     Mar 23: The Jeffersonian
Mar 24: Logan Street Market
Mar 25: California Community Center

March 31
New Albany, IN
Paul W. Ogle Center at Indiana University Southeast
Nightlites at the Ogle Series
“Rach and Bartók”
Christian Reif, conductor
Alexi Kenney, violin
BARTÓK: Violin Concerto No. 2
RACHMANINOFF: Symphony No. 3

April 1
Classics Series
“Rach and Bartók”
Christian Reif, conductor
Alexi Kenney, violin
ŽEBELJAN: Hum away, Hum away, strings!
BARTÓK: Violin Concerto No. 2
RACHMANINOFF: Symphony No. 3

May 12 at 11am
Coffee Series
“From Silence to Splendor”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Dashon Burton, baritone
Christopher CERRONE: The Year of Silence (LO co-commission, world premiere)
BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 7

May 13
Classics Series
“From Silence to Splendor”
Teddy Abrams, conductor
Dashon Burton, vocalist
Christopher CERRONE: The Year of Silence (LO co-commission; adapted from Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Year of Silence”)
BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 7

All dates, programs, and artists are subject to change.

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© 21C Media Group, August 2022