Teddy Abrams, 26, with a long and impressive Bay Area music career, has been appointed music director designate of the Louisville Orchestra. He will take over the famously adventurous orchestra from Jorge Mester next September, when Mester becomes Music Director Emeritus.
Louisville Orchestra Executive Director Andrew Kipe said "we are extremely lucky to have gotten Teddy at this juncture in his career. He is on a meteoric trajectory that will only be an asset to Louisville."
Abrams is the Music Director and Conductor of the Britt Classical Festival, the Assistant Conductor of the Detroit Symphony, and the Resident Conductor of the MAV Symphony Orchestra in Budapest. He said of the appointment: "I knew from the first time I came to Louisville last season that this position had tremendous potential. I felt an immediate and powerful, positive connection with this city, and that initial chemistry grew as I began working with the orchestra’s wonderful musicians."
Abrams has been ever-present on the music scene here: he has a family in Palo Alto, and he attended Laney College (at age 11, having skipped high school) and the S.F. Conservatory of Music. He's been playing piano since age 5, started clarinet a few years later, was the longest-serving member of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, studied with Michael Tilson Thomas, and later was named his assistant for educational activities with MTT's New World Symphony.
Abrams also performed regularly with the St. Petersburg String Quartet, soloed with the San Francisco, Oakland East Bay and Berkeley symphonies, arranged music for and conducted rehearsals of the Youth Orchestra, and conducted the New World Symphony in concerts at Carnegie Hall and in Washington, D.C.
A decade ago, SFCV's Scott MacClelland wrote of the then 16-year-old:
The star of the evening's second half was Teddy Abrams, the precocious teenager from Palo Alto, who apparently doesn't know that mere mortals can't be doing so much, so professionally, at his age, namely: playing piano, composing, conducting and, in this instance, playing clarinet in the Brahms Quintet in B Minor. Before starting, Abrams provided spoken background to the Brahms, recalling the impact, on the aging (then in his late 50s) composer, of the Meiningen clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, who was the inspiration for a trio, two sonatas and, after Mozart a century earlier, the second greatest clarinet quintet in history.The collaboration between Abrams and the St. Petersburg proved most felicitous, a loving and yearning performance that greened up the autumnal Brahms with the young clarinetist's flawless technique and youthful ardor (especially in the “storm sequence” that punctuates the second movement Adagio). Abrams plays without a trace of vibrato, fearlessly giving himself no place to hide. But no hiding was needed and the hosting Chamber Music Monterey Bay's audience knew it. Abrams has plainly emerged as a master of the instrument.
As if to gild the prodigy's lily, the five musicians encored with an Abrams original called Tanzoct, an "octatonic dance" the composer explained. The five-minute ditty cleverly shifted its material (using a "gypsyesque" scale) among the instruments, "in true encore fashion," Abrams added.
Earlier this year, Michael Zwiebach published a feature here about Abrams. In July, Abrams conducted SFS in a Best of Tchaikovsky concert in the America's Cup Pavilion.