Christopher Cerrone - The Year of Silence (Teddy Abrams)

Information

• Christopher Cerrone - The Year of Silence
• Andrew Norman - Split

Dashon Burton, vocalist & narrator

Jeffrey Kahane, piano

Louisville Orchestra

Teddy Abrams, conductor

Date: 2026

Label: PENTATONE

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The Louisville Orchestra, led by Music Director Teddy Abrams, presents The Year of Silence on PENTATONE, an album highlighting contemporary orchestral works by Christopher Cerrone and Andrew Norman. The title track features bass-baritone Dashon Burton as a narrator shifting between speech and song to interpret Kevin Brockmeier’s short story about a city falling silent—a narrative that resonated deeply with Cerrone during the pandemic. Uniquely utilizing the orchestra to define silence as an enveloping presence, the piece stands in kinetic opposition to Norman’s Split, a restless, fragmented composition featuring pianist Jeffrey Kahane.

Internationally acclaimed American composer Christopher Cerrone is celebrated for his distinctive musical blend of lush textures, acoustic-electronic timbres, and deep literary fluency. A graduate of the Yale and Manhattan schools of music, Cerrone first achieved major prominence as a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his innovative site-specific opera Invisible Cities. His subsequent vocal and orchestral catalog includes acclaimed works like In a Grove and The Year of Silence. A multi-Grammy-nominated artist, he won a Grammy Award for his 2025 album Don’t Look Down. Cerrone currently serves on the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music.

Grammy Award-winning conductor and composer Teddy Abrams has served as the Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra since 2014, driving immense artistic renewal and community impact. Recognized for breaking the traditional mold of modern conductors, Abrams has launched community-building initiatives like the "In Harmony" statewide tour and the innovative Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps residency. Alongside a robust guest-conducting career with elite global ensembles, he is an accomplished composer of large-scale collaborations, including a piano concerto for Yuja Wang, the upcoming Broadway musical ALI, and immersive regional projects. He previously concluded a decade-long tenure helming Oregon’s Britt Festival Orchestra.