MESSAGE FROM THE LOUISVILLE ORCHESTRA

Dear Guests,

As we come to the close of yet another eventful season, I’d like to thank you for your continued support of The Louisville Orchestra. We would not be here if not for your loyalty.

As we look forward to the 2023-2024 season, we have several exciting updates to share with you. We have invested in a new online ticketing portal giving all patrons the option of receiving digital or printed tickets for subscriptions and single events. Subscribers and single ticket holders will be able to manage all aspects of the ticket-buying experience through their own personal accounts. In tandem with the new portal, our Patron Services team will expand the scope of our concierge ticketing service for subscribers and donors.

We also have interesting and innovative programming coming your way next season. We have listened to your requests and are expanding our Films in Concert offerings to a three-concert package that can be added to any other subscription package. Details are still being finalized, but watch your e-mail for the announcement. We will have more special events throughout the season including concerts at the Louisville Palace Theatre and Iroquois Amphitheater, as well as an entire community festival programmed by our new Creators Corps artists. We will continue our free Music Without Borders concerts around the city as well as our residency at the Louisville Free Public Libraries. Our Classics, Coffee, and Pops concerts will continue as always in Whitney Hall featuring beautiful standard repertoire as well as some new music and LO premieres just to keep things interesting.

We are excited and ready to take your renewal or new subscription for the next season. There is a little something for everyone to enjoy. Please take the time to review your renewal packet that was recently mailed or stop by the LO table in the lobby so we can answer any questions you may have about joining our family. And don’t forget — the Subscription Renewal Deadline is June 15th!

Have a great summer and we look forward to seeing you all in the new season.

Carla Givan Motes Director of Patron Services

TEDDY ABRAMS, MUSIC DIRECTOR

Named Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year, Teddy Abrams is the widely acclaimed Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra. In his ninth season as Music Director, Abrams launches the Orchestra’s groundbreaking Creators Corps – a fully funded residency for three composers – and the Orchestra goes on tour across Kentucky in a first-ofits-kind multiyear funding commitment from the Kentucky State Legislature.

Abrams’s rap-opera, The Greatest: Muhammad Ali, premiered in 2017, celebrating Louisville’s hometown hero with an all-star cast that included Rhiannon Giddens and Jubilant Sykes, as well as Jecorey “1200” Arthur, with whom he started the Louisville Orchestra Rap School. Abrams’s work with the Louisville Orchestra has been profiled on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, PBS’ Articulate, and PBS NewsHour.

Highlights of the 2022-2023 season include guest conducting engagements with the Cincinnati, Kansas City, Utah, Colorado, and Pacific Symphonies, a return to conduct the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, and his debut with the Tiroler Symphonieorchester Innsbruck.

Abrams has been Music Director and Conductor of the Britt Festival Orchestra since 2013, where, in addition to an annual three-week festival of concerts, he has taken the orchestra across the region in the creation of new works — including Michael Gordon’s Natural History, 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 Symphony for Nature; and Pulitzer Prize-winning-composer Caroline Shaw’s Brush, an experiential work written to be performed in Summer 2021 on the Jacksonville Woodlands Trail system.

Abrams recently collaborated with Jim James, vocalist and guitarist for My Morning Jacket, on the song cycle The Order of Nature, which they premiered with the Louisville Orchestra in 2018 and recorded on Decca Gold. They performed the work with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in 2019. In addition to The Order of Nature, Teddy and the Louisville Orchestra recorded All In in 2017 with vocalist Storm Large. Most recently, he released Space Variations, a collection of three new compositions for Universal Music Group’s 2022 World Sleep Day.

As a guest conductor, Abrams has worked with such distinguished ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Chicago, San Francisco, National, Houston, Pacific, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Vancouver, Colorado, Utah, and Phoenix Symphonies; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and the Sarasota and Florida Orchestras. 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 to 2014. From 2008 to 2011, Abrams was the Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor of the New World Symphony.