{"id":9512,"date":"2021-10-12T15:04:20","date_gmt":"2021-10-12T15:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=9512"},"modified":"2021-10-12T15:04:20","modified_gmt":"2021-10-12T15:04:20","slug":"teddy-abrams-named-musical-america-conductor-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/teddy-abrams-named-musical-america-conductor-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Teddy Abrams named Musical America Conductor of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

Musical America<\/strong>\u00a0has named\u00a0Teddy Abrams<\/strong>\u2014the galvanizing conductor now in his eighth season as Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra\u2014Conductor of the Year<\/strong>. From his earliest days in Louisville, Teddy\u00a0<\/strong>has been lauded for his efforts to connect the orchestra with the community at large, exemplified most recently by his musical responses to the global pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement, as well as creative initiatives like his rap-opera,\u00a0The Greatest<\/em>,\u00a0<\/strong>honoring heavyweight champion and Louisville native Muhammad Ali. Teddy also serves as Music Director and Conductor of the Britt Festival Orchestra in Jacksonville, Oregon.<\/p>\n

As a recipient of this prestigious award, he joins a long list of conducting luminaries that includes Marin Alsop, Jaap van Zweden, Gianandrea Noseda, Pablo Heras-Casado, Franz Welser-M\u00f6st, and Abrams\u2019s own mentor, Michael Tilson Thomas.<\/p>\n

Watch Video.<\/a><\/p>\n

Early in the pandemic, Teddy redoubled his efforts to bring comfort through music to people across the city. He and the orchestra participated in \u201cLift Up Lou<\/strong>,\u201d collaborating with Louisville\u2019s mayor to offer Louisville residents \u201cuplifting and engaging\u201d live and shareable content as well as ideas to stay connected. Teddy brought together numerous Louisville-based musicians to record the collaborative song \u201cLift Up Louisville<\/strong>,\u201d with proceeds benefiting the One Louisville COVID-19 Response Fund; played a series of\u00a0one-man pop-up shows<\/strong>\u00a0on his electronic keyboard in neighborhoods around the city; offered\u00a0personal ten-minute online<\/strong>\u00a0\u201ccomfort concerts\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0throughout the pandemic; and co-hosted the radio show \u201cIn This Together<\/strong>\u201d on WUOL Classical Louisville. His indefatigable community engagement, not only during the pandemic but throughout his tenure, has received significant attention from national media, including a feature in\u00a0Vogue<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that detailed the orchestra\u2019s virtual season-opening concert honoring Breonna Taylor, and profiles on PBS\u2019s\u00a0Articulate<\/em><\/a>\u00a0show, the\u00a0PBS Newshour<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0NPR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In addition to conducting the Britt Festival Orchestra\u2019s annual three-week festival of concerts, he has taken the orchestra across the region in the creation of new work\u2014including Michael Gordon\u2019s\u00a0Natural History<\/em>, which was premiered on the edge of Crater Lake National Park in partnership with the National Parks Service, and was the subject of the PBS documentary\u00a0Symphony for Nature<\/a><\/em>; and Pulitzer Prize-winning-composer Caroline Shaw\u2019s\u00a0Brush<\/em>, an experiential work written to be performed this summer on the Jacksonville Woodlands Trail system.<\/p>\n

Highlights of Teddy\u2019s 2021-22 season include engagements with the Buffalo Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Pacific Symphony, and Sarasota Orchestra. He appears as a featured speaker at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival. As a guest conductor, Teddy has worked with such distinguished ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the San Francisco, National, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Vancouver, Colorado, Utah, and Phoenix Symphonies; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and the Florida Orchestra. Internationally, he has worked with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, and the Malaysian Philharmonic. He served as Assistant Conductor of the Detroit Symphony from 2012-2014. From 2008 to 2011, Abrams was the Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor of the New World Symphony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Musical America\u00a0has named\u00a0Teddy Abrams\u2014the galvanizing conductor now in his eighth season as Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra\u2014Conductor of the Year. From his earliest days in Louisville, Teddy\u00a0has been lauded for his efforts to connect the orchestra with the community at large, exemplified most recently by his musical responses to the global pandemic and Black … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9513,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3613,7074,6264,4585,7073,3686,3931],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9512"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9516,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9512\/revisions\/9516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/9513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}