2025-26 Season Just Announced

Teddy Abrams and Louisville Orchestra’s 2025-26: highlights include Mahler 9; world premieres from Lisa Bielawa and Creators Corps members; soloists Yuja Wang, Tessa Lark, Jonathan Biss, Anne Akiko Meyers, & Time For Three

The Louisville Orchestra and Music Director Teddy Abrams – winners of a Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for their collaboration with pianist Yuja Wang on her album The American Project – are thrilled to announce the lineup for their 2025–26 season. Season highlights include Wang returning to perform Ligeti’s sole Piano Concerto (Nov 21, 22); Abrams leading Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (Jan 16, 17); and the world premiere of former Creators Corps member Lisa Bielawa’s LO-commissioned Violin Concerto, written for soloist Tessa Lark, on a program with world premieres from current Creators Corps members Anthony Green and Chelsea Komschlies and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony (Oct 24, 25). Abrams also conducts pianist Jonathan Biss in Mozart’s Ninth Piano Concerto, along with American music by Schuman, Billings, and Ives (Feb 20, 21); collaborates with the Louisville Ballet on a performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, on a program with another world premiere by Chelsea Komschlies and Mason Bates’s Concerto for String Trio, featuring Grammy-winning ensemble Time For Three (April 11); and leads performances of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue along with John Luther Adams’s An Atlas of Deep Time and another world premiere by Anthony Green (April 24, 25). Guest conductors in this season’s Classics Series include Robert Spano leading pianist Tony Siqi Yun in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, sharing the bill with music of Claude Baker and Christopher Theofanidis (Oct 4); and Grammy-winning composer Eric Whitacre conducting a program of his own music, with violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and the Louisville Chamber Choir (March 7). The season is rounded out by a fall edition of the “In Harmony” tour (Sep 11–20); a Pops Series led by Principal Pops Conductor Bob Bernhardt and others; and much more. 

Abrams, who is ready to embark on his twelfth season with the orchestra, elaborates: 

“The LO’s 2025-26 season is full of bucket-list orchestral works and legendary soloists that I am thrilled to bring to our community. From Mahler’s overwhelming and final 9th Symphony to the brilliant artistry of pianist Yuja Wang (triumphantly returning after our Grammy win from our last collaboration), and from our original choreography of Copland’s Appalachian Spring to the monumental An Atlas of Deep Time, this season represents the unmatched musicality, powerful expressivity, and absolute passion that defines our Louisville Orchestra. Seasons like this are meant to be enjoyed from start to finish for Louisvillians, and each program is designed to be compelling enough to warrant a visit to our city from anywhere in the world, further positioning Louisville as a major creative destination.”  

“In Harmony” Tour 

The September leg of the “In Harmony” tour will be the first time the tour stretches over a consecutive two-week period, and, because several of the destinations are in Kentucky’s Appalachian region, Copland’s Appalachian Spring will be prominently featured. Other variously programmed works include the “Hoe Down” from Copland’s ballet Rodeo, selections from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings and John Adams’s Shaker Loops, inaugural Creators Corps member Lisa Bielawa’s Home, arrangements of Shaker tunes by current Creators Corps member Chelsea Komschlies, and a new work by her fellow Creators Corps composer Anthony Green. See below for more information about the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps. 

Classics and Coffee Series  

For the first of the six Classics Series programs he conducts in 2025–26, Abrams leads the world premiere of Lisa Bielawa’s LO-commissioned Violin Concerto, written for soloist Tessa Lark, who previously joined the LO on one of the 2022 iterations of the “In Harmony” tour. Also on the program are world premieres from current Creators Corps members Anthony Green and Chelsea Komschlies and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony (Oct 24, 25). See below for more information about the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps.  

In 2022, Abrams’s friend and Curtis Institute classmate Yuja Wang joined the LO for the premiere of Abrams’s Piano Concerto – dedicated to her – which they also recorded live for Wang’s Grammy-winning album The American Project. In the fall, she returns for a performance of Ligeti’s sole Piano Concerto, which Gramophone praised her for playing with “sly, jazzy exuberance.” The program also includes Wang’s performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Abrams leading the LO in Bartók’s tour-de-force Concerto for Orchestra, which demands virtuosity from the entire ensemble, from the first violins to the bass trombone (Nov 21, 22). 

Mahler’s symphonies have played an important part in Abrams’s tenure with the LO. His Fifth Symphony was the subject for a “Teddy Talks Mahler” concert in 2020, and when the orchestra played the “Resurrection” Symphony as its season opener in 2016–17, the Courier-Journal declared that the performance “showed the artistic muscle it takes to present such monumental music.” Leonard Bernstein, who was a mentor to Abrams’s mentor Michael Tilson Thomas, was in large part responsible for raising the profile of Mahler’s symphonies through his many performances and recordings, thus Abrams’s enthusiasm for the composer continues an important lineage of American performances. This season he conducts Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a gigantic work lasting more than an hour whose ending is usually interpreted (though there are dissenters) as the composer’s conscious farewell to the world following the diagnosis of a fatal heart disease (Jan 16, 17). 

The following month, Abrams and the LO celebrate 250 years since the founding of the United States with a program titled “Sounds of a New Nation.” They are joined by pianist Jonathan Biss – “a pianist whose probing, incisive, and deeply considered performances are consistently challenging and rewarding” (San Francsico Classical Voice) – for a performance of Mozart’s Ninth Piano Concerto, written in 1777. Also included are Charles Ives’s New England Holidays, a set of pieces by Mozart’s American contemporary William Billings, and a latter-day composition by William Schuman – the movement “Chester” from his New England Triptych –based on Billings’s music (Feb 20, 21).  

A fully staged performance of Aaron Copland’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ballet, Appalachian Spring, presented in collaboration with the Louisville Ballet, will be performed in April. Choreographed in 2019 by Louisville Ballet’s then-resident choreographer, South African-born Andrea Schermoly, the ballet marked the first time new choreography had been approved by the Copland Foundation since the premiere of Martha Graham’s version in 1944. Also on the program is another world premiere composition by Creators Corps member Chelsea Komschlies, as well as Mason Bates’s Concerto for String Trio, featuring Time For Three (April 11).  

In the season finale, Abrams conducts Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the work for which his Piano Concerto for Yuja Wang was initially intended to be a companion piece before it took on a life of its own.  The Gershwin showstopper will be performed along with John Luther Adams’s An Atlas of Deep Time and another world premiere by Anthony Green. Adams’s work, which premiered last year, was characterized by The Boston Globe as something of a counterpart to the composer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean, adding: “Adams here attempts to capture what he calls ‘the older, deeper resonances of the earth.’ The vast timbral range he creates in the orchestra envelops a listener in mesmerizing and often terrifying ways” (April 24, 25).  

With the exception of the Louisville Ballet collaboration on Appalachian Spring, each of these Classics Series performances conducted by Abrams will be paired with a concert the previous day in the orchestra’s popular Coffee Series, which presents abridged versions of Classics performances, condensed into shorter, intermission-free concerts with complimentary coffee. 

Guest conductors for the 2025–26 Classics Series include Robert Spano, who leads pianist Tony Siqi Yun in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. The concerto shares the bill with Claude Baker’s The Glass Bead Game – commissioned by the LO four decades ago and inspired by the novel of the same name by Hermann Hesse – and Christopher Theofanidis’s On the Bridge of the Eternal, about which the composer says: “It has this feeling you might get when looking at the Grand Canyon, or the night sky – that no matter what’s passing in front of you, there’s always a bigger picture” (Oct 4). In the spring, a second guest-conducted program comprises music by Eric Whitacre, with the composer on the podium, violinist Anne Akiko Meyers as soloist, and the Louisville Chamber Choir (March 7). 

Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps 

The Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps (LOCC) program, launched in the 2022-23 season, is the only program of its kind that deeply integrates artists into the orchestra and the city. Each year, the selected Creators move to Louisville’s Shelby Park neighborhood for the entirety of the concert season, serving as full-time LO staff members, receiving an annual salary, health insurance, housing, and custom studio workspaces and becoming immersed in the fabric of city life. The new Creators Corps members this season, Anthony Green and Chelsea Komschlies, will have their works featured throughout the season in various settings, including the “In Harmony” tour and multiple Classics and Coffee Series concerts.  

Behind all the artistic endeavors of Anthony R. Green are the ideals of equality and freedom, which manifest themselves in diverse ways in a composition, a performance, a collaboration, or social justice work. As a composer, his works have been presented in over 25 countries across six continents, at venues including Symphony Space, Jordan Hall, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Elbphilharmonie, and Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza, amongst others. As a multidisciplinary performer, he has appeared at venues in the US, Cyprus, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Turkey, South Korea, Brazil, and Ghana. He is also the co-founder of Castle of our Skins, the co-artistic director of the Cortona Sessions summer new music festival, and a visiting professor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. He has received grants from the Argosy Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous foundations and consortium commissions. 

The “ingratiating allure” (San Diego Story) of Chelsea Komschlies’s music blends the familiar and the strange in uncanny ways. She prioritizes perception of her music by the human brain and shared experiences among listeners. Her compositions, each a distinct fantasy world, evoke vivid multisensory imagery and a range of psycho-emotional landscapes, from whimsical nostalgia and camp to eerie disquiet, and from altered states of consciousness to glittering spiritual awe. A Ph.D. candidate in composition under Jean Lesage at McGill University, she has been honored with McGill’s Andrew Svoboda Prize for Orchestral Composition and the Research Alive Student Prize. The Fonds de Recherche du Québec further supports her thesis work on how composers can encode shared multisensory information like light, color, and texture in a science-backed way, and has recognized her as the top-ranked music research project in the province. Her work has been acknowledged and supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, the Hermitage, Fromm, and ASCAP Foundations, among others.  

Pops Series 

Led by Bob Bernhardt, this season’s Pops Series includes the return of Ben Folds (Sep 5); Dolly Parton’s Threads: My Songs in Symphony, offering a multimedia symphonic journey through her legendary career, guided on screen by the singer herself (Jan 31); and “Clouds in My Coffee,” a program conducted by Ted Sperling that combines songs by Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon (Feb 28). The Pops Series concludes with Police drummer Stewart Copeland’s reimagining of the group’s songs with full orchestra in “Police: Deranged” (April 17).  

Additional performances 

Three additional performances are offered in 2025–26 as exclusive first access opportunities to subscribers. “Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues,” narrated by Freeman and conducted by Broadway music director Sean Mayes, is a journey through the music, culture and legacy of the Mississippi Delta. The performance also highlights the vital role of Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a cornerstone of Blues preservation (Oct 11). Conductor/composer Steve Hackman presents “Beethoven X Coldplay,” which asks the musical question: would Beethoven have found meaning in the music of Coldplay? Three world-class vocalists join the full orchestra at Paristown Hall, and Hackman alternates between conducting and playing the piano (Oct 18). Finally, two performances of “Disney’s Hocus Pocus in Concert” celebrate Halloween, with John Debney’s score for the 1993 film performed live to picture on the big screen (Oct 29, 30). 

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