Among Teddy Abrams’ most ambitious projects as music director of the Louisville Orchestra “is the Festival of American Music, now in its second year,” writes Elizabeth Kramer in Thursday’s (4/6) Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY). This year’s festival will “span three weeks and include six concerts—one with Ben Folds, two featuring the works of American female composers, and one featuring up-and-coming American composers…. An April 15 concert [will feature] Abrams with his mentor … Michael Tilson Thomas. The two will co-conduct the Louisville Orchestra [in music by] Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin and John Adams…. The inclusion of works by Copland and Bernstein came with concrete reasons…. Copland mentored Bernstein and both worked with a young Thomas. Years later, after Thomas became a conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, a 9-year-old Teddy Abrams saw him conducting and [wrote] him a letter to tell him he wanted to do that as an adult. From that, a mentorship grew that continued at the New World Symphony, [where] Abrams worked with Thomas as a conducting fellow and an assistant conductor.” The Louisville Orchestra program includes Copland’s Orchestral Variations, “a piece the Louisville Orchestra commissioned in 1957 that the composer transcribed from his Piano Variations.”
Posted April 7, 2017
