Teddy Abrams is staying as music director, according to the CJ:

The Louisville Orchestra’s Grammy Award-winning music director has announced he will continue to innovate and shape the city’s sound and spirit through the 2027–28 season.

Since arriving in Louisvlile in 2013, Teddy Abrams has become a transformative force in the city’s cultural life and one of the most dynamic figures in classical music. Signing a new three-year contract ensures Abrams will extend his leadership of the Louisville Orchestra and continue a legacy which has redefined what it means to lead a major American orchestra.

“Louisville and its Orchestra have shaped my life in ways I could not have imagined,” Abrams said. “Louisville is my home, and the Louisville Orchestra is my family. My colleagues in the Orchestra perform brilliantly, with tremendous passion and virtuosity. Together we’ve worked incredibly hard to raise the institution to an exceptional level where our musicality and creativity are understood locally and internationally.”

This is notable, because a major West Coast orchestra is looking for a new music director, and Teddy has the chops to go to a bigger city with a greater pool of wealth from which to draw for the arts. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

Saturday night, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted his San Francisco Symphony in a staggering performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, known as the “Resurrection.” It was a ferocious performance and an exalted one of gripping intensity.

This is a symphony emblematic for Mahler of life and death, an urgent questioning of why we are here. After 80 minutes of the highest highs and lowest lows, of falling in and out of love with life, of smelling the most sensual roses on the planet in a search for renewal, resurrection arrives in a blaze of amazement.

Mahler has no answers for the purpose of life. His triumph, and Salonen’s in his overpowering performance, is in the divine glory of keeping going, keeping asking.

The audience responded with a stunned and tumultuous standing ovation. The musicians pounded their feet on the Davies Symphony Hall stage, resisting Salonen’s urgings to stand and take a bow.

It was no longer his San Francisco Symphony. After five years as music director, Salonen had declined to renew his contract, saying he didn’t share the board of trustees’ vision of the future.

Hopefully, Louisville knows what it has in Teddy. He’s the kind of talent that bigger cities would love to get their hands on.