MUSIC

Energetic Louisville conductor Teddy Abrams brings ‘American Voices’ to Sarasota Orchestra

Jay Handelman
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Teddy Abrams, musical director and conductor of Louisville Orchestra.

When dynamic young conductor Teddy Abrams, music director of the Louisville Orchestra, takes the podium to lead the Sarasota Orchestra next weekend, he will be working on some familiar music, including his own.

The program for the “American Voices” concerts that begin Friday in the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, includes Abrams’ Overture in Sonata Form, as well as Ellen Reid’s “Petrichor” and Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” It also features pianist Conrad Tao joining the orchestra for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

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While acknowledging that orchestras need to balance the kinds of new and familiar music they play throughout a season to attract audiences, Abrams said he set a clear focus of what he wants to do musically this year.

“Whether as a guest conductor or working in Louisville or performing, l believe in giving living composers a platform and a voice now more than ever, and creating an environment where the music we play speaks to our time and our values as Americans,” he said in a telephone interview.

Performing the work of American composers is part of “the communal process of what orchestras do best, making our communities stronger through the shared work we put out there,” he said.

Abrams was hired as music director and conductor of the Louisville Orchestra in 2014. He was 27 and became the youngest person ever named to the position with a major orchestra. Since then he has been gaining national and international attention for his innovative programs and working to engage young people in classical music, one of his major goals. He was profiled in a 2019 segment on “CBS Sunday Morning.”

In October, he was named Musical America’s conductor of the year, joining a long list of notable artists, including his own mentor Michael Tilson Thomas, who won in 1995.

Teddy Abrams, music director of the Louisville Orchestra, works with an elementary school student to demonstrate how common objects like a vacuum cleaner hose can be used as a musical instrument.

After the award was announced, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer told a news conference that, “If you know Teddy, you know what he does is about the heart and lifting up people,” according to a report in the Courier-Journal. “To him, art and music are not some standalone initiative, it’s about how the arts can shape a community and the community can shape art.”

Conductor starts career at young age

When he was just 14, Abrams was assigned by Thomas to conduct “Appalachian Spring” at Carnegie Hall.

“It was amazing as a little kid to get to conduct this music with him advising me. I have this intense relationship with the music,” he said. “I find it so reassuring. I don’t think you’d describe a lot of music that way. It feels like an old friend, intimately so.”

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Abrams wrote Overture in Sonata Form for the opening of his first season in Louisville in 2014.

“I love composing,” he said. “I feel every conductor should be a composer, even if not a formal thing. The best way to study any kind of music is to compose it yourself. All performers should be creative. And I think improvisation is a huge part of the creative process.”

Louisville Orchestra director Teddy Abrams performs during the breakfast portion of the annual Wayside Christian Mission Thanksgiving event at the Hotel Louisville. Nov. 27, 2014

He has been writing music since childhood and now he makes sure to set aside time to compose.

“If I don’t establish set dates where pieces are due, I won’t find time to write. And I do hit those deadlines,” he said.

The sonata form “underlies most pieces from the romantic classical era and beyond,” he said. “It’s a system of using different harmonic areas and counterpoints. It’s why you can listen to 20 minutes of a Mahler symphony and it makes sense.”

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Reid is a young composer Abrams describes as a “special talent.” She won the Pulitzer Prize for music for her opera “Prism,” which had its world premiere in Los Angeles in 2018.

“Petrichor” was written for chamber orchestra “and it’s quite fascinating because it involves placing musicians in various areas throughout the hall. It’s relatively new and I’ve only done it once.”

Audiences are still just discovering “the breadth of her talent. It’s interesting that her music is both rooted in things that are familiar and a real language that speaks to people, but the sounds she comes up with are just stunning and unique.”

The title is a word that refers to the fragrant smell after a first rain following a period of dry weather.

Keeping classical music vital

While most of the program features contemporary music, Abrams stresses that even Beethoven was writing for the modern audiences of his time.

And he wants audiences to feel more comfortable with music that’s new or different from what they know. He wants the world to “return to a place where the enthusiasm is there for music written for now. That’s why we have Haydn, Mozart, Bernstein, John Adams. It was music composed for us as human beings. When you take the museum approach you take yourself off from the living vitality of the art form.”

He said there are amazing talents, like Reid, “writing music today that people will want to hear. There was a period, and we have to own up to our own challenges, when composers were writing the most aggressive alien music possible” and it turned off many audience members.

Today there has been a “remarkable push by composers using music we all understand, doing it in ways that nobody has heard before. If you want to create vitality in the music world, we have to focus on the new,” he said.

Pianist Conrad Tao performs with the Sarasota Orchestra and guest conductor Teddy Abrams.

The program marks his first time working with Tao, a 27-year-old pianist from Illinois who was named “one of five classical music faces to watch” in the 2018-19 season by The New York Times.

He was supposed to work with Tao at the Britt Festival he leads in Jacksonville, Oregon each summer.

“We were going to play one of his own compositions. I’ve seen him perform a number of times. He’s one of the great composers and a serious mind and I recommend audiences do a little research him. If you only see him perform a Beethoven concerto, you won’t get the full richness of what his experience is.”

‘American Voices’

Sarasota Orchestra. Teddy Abrams, guest conductor. Conrad Tao, guest pianist. 8 p.m. Dec. 10-11, 2:30 p.m. Dec. 12, Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, 777 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. 941-953-3434; sarasotaorchestra.org

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