Best-known as the Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra, Grammy Award winner Teddy Abrams is also an established composer and multi-instrumentalist. Variously scored for orchestra, small ensemble, piano, voice, and electronics, his music embraces influences from across the stylistic spectrum. He has written numerous works for the Louisville Orchestra, including a piano concerto for Yuja Wang, which they recorded for their Grammy-winning Deutsche Grammophon album, The American Project; Mammoth, premiered with Yo-Yo Ma and Davóne Tines at Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park; Unified Field, a ballet presented with the Louisville Ballet; and a fanfare for the then Prince Charles, to commemorate the future king’s visit to Louisville. Abrams is now at work on an orchestral representation of Kentucky’s history and culture as part of his Emerson Collective Fellowship, which recognizes his contributions to building local community through music.

As the galvanizing force behind the Louisville Orchestra’s extraordinary artistic renewal, Abrams was named Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year. He has made guest conducting appearances with such distinguished ensembles as the Chicago, Boston, National, and San Francisco Symphonies, and the Los Angeles, Helsinki, and Luxembourg Philharmonic orchestras.

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The day after the 2016 presidential election, singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane boarded a train at Penn Station and traveled 8,980 miles around the continental U.S. with no phone or internet access, talking to dozens of strangers in an attempt to better understand his country and fellow citizens. The resulting album, Book of Travelers, marks Gabriel’s debut for Nonesuch Records. By turns sprawling and intimate, this collection of songs is at once a prayer for empathy and reconciliation, as well as an unflinching examination of the complex and often troubled history of the United States.

Over the last decade, Kahane has quietly established himself as a songwriter all his own, grafting a deep interest in storytelling to a keen sense of harmony and rhythm. His major label debut, The Ambassador, a study of Los Angeles seen through the lens of ten street addresses, was hailed by Rolling Stone as “one of the year’s very best albums”.

Gabriel has collaborated with a diverse array of artists, including Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Blake Mills, and Chris Thile, the front man of Punch Brothers, for whom Kahane opened forty concerts in the US in 2015 and 2016. As a composer, he has been commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, A Far Cry, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Oregon Symphony, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with whom he toured in the spring of 2013, performing Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States, an hour-long cycle on texts from the WPA American Guide Series. Other orchestral highlights have included solo appearances with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and The Knights, with whom Gabriel recorded his orchestral song cycle Crane Palimpsest, following a performance at Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall.

An avid theater Artist, Kahane has appeared twice at the BAM Next Wave Festival, in 2014 with the critically-lauded staged version of The Ambassador, directed by Tony-winner John Tiffany; and returning in 2017 with 8980: Book of Travelers, directed by Daniel Fish. He is also the composer-lyricist of the musical February House, which premiered in 2012 at the Public Theater.

A graduate of Brown University and two-time MacDowell Colony fellow, Gabriel lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. His début album, Shy and Mighty, which features ten interrelated pieces for two pianos performed by himself and pianist David Kaplan, was released by Nonesuch Records in May 2010 to immediate critical acclaim. Of the disc, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that Shy and Mighty “achieves an unhurried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene… more mighty than shy, [Andres] sounds like himself.”

Timo’s new works include a piano quintet for Jonathan Biss and the Elias String Quartet, commissioned and presented by Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and San Francisco Performances; a solo piano work for Kirill Gerstein, commissioned by the Gilmore Foundation; a new string quartet for the Library of Congress, premiered by the Attacca Quartet; and a new piece for yMusic. Upcoming commissions include a major work for Third Coast Percussion and an ensemble song cycle to be premiered by himself, Gabriel Kahane, Becca Stevens, Ted Hearne and Nathan Koci at the Ecstatic Music Festival, and presented by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series.

Recent highlights include solo recitals at Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall, (le) Poisson Rouge, and San Francisco Performances; a weekend of performances in Los Angeles, featuring a new work for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and a performance of his re-composition of the Mozart “Coronation” Concerto; and performances of Crashing Through Fences by eighth blackbird. Collaborative projects of the past season include a duo program with Gabriel Kahane at the Library of Congress, and a world premiere performance of selected Philip Glass Études, alongside the composer, as part of Nico Muhly’s “A Scream and An Outrage” festival at the Barbican.

Timo earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale and in addition to music, he has worked occasionally as a professional graphic and web designer. He is one sixth of the Sleeping Giant composers’ collective, and performs regularly with ACME. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, BMI, and ASCAP, as well as grants from New Music USA and the Copland Fund.

A new album of his orchestral works, “Home Stretch”, was released by Nonesuch Records in July 2013.

An avid cyclist, Timo can often be sighted commuting astride his 1983 Mercian.