TEDDY ABRAMS, conductor
KENT HATTEBERG, chorusmaster
MORGAN JAMES, soprano
HAYLEY LIPKE, soprano
LIZ CULPEPPER, mezzo
SPENCER LAWRENCE BOYD, tenor
SONJIN KIM, bass

Chloe Tula appears as Guest Harpist with the Louisville Orchestra in the world premiere of music director Teddy Abrams’ “The Song of the River”, an original piece for soprano and orchestra, and featuring an exquisite harp cadenza. This is Chloe’s debut with the Louisville Orchestra. This will be the first half of the concert; the second half is Beethoven’s famous Ninth Symphony.

From louisvilleorchestra.org:

The Song of the River is a 35-minute song cycle for soprano and full orchestra inspired by several intersecting contemporary and historical themes, primarily the symmetry between the future of our global environment and the Norse mythological concept of “Ragnarok” (also known as the “Gotterdammerung”), which is the long-foretold end of days in which the world is submerged in water. Abrams states, “I imagined a final, futuristic day when our beautiful Ohio River has risen to such an extent that the totality of human creating and expression is reflected in its waters, and just before that last day ends, the River itself offers a song that honors the legacy of humanity. Many of the poems in this piece celebrate our greatest achievements and aspirations, while some of the songs question our choices and actions. In an age of incessant digital iconography and truncated discourse, I found myself (and most of my generation) in an exhausted, anxious loop from bearing the heaviness of our daily dose of information, much of it negative and a great deal of it inconsequential. The creation of my work was both a cathartic self-therapy and an exploration, zoomed as far out as possible, of the confusion and awe that I continue to feel in equal measure at the state of our species.”