Michael Tilson Thomas / Teddy Abrams: The American Project

Yuja Wang has spent much of her recording career on the core Romantic and 20th-century repertoire that made her name, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Ravel. The American Project, recorded with the Louisville Orchestra under its music director Teddy Abrams, goes a different way entirely: two works written for her specifically, neither of them a repertoire staple, both genuinely new to disc. It won Best Classical Instrumental Solo at the 2024 Grammy Awards, the Louisville Orchestra’s first Grammy in the orchestra’s history.

The programme pairs conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas’s You Come Here Often? with the world premiere recording of Abrams’s own Piano Concerto, a work Wang had already premiered live in Louisville the year before this recording. Rather than a single new concerto slotted alongside familiar repertoire, the more usual shape for this kind of disc, the whole album is built around music written with Wang’s own playing in mind, by two composer-conductors working from inside American orchestral life rather than from the outside.

About the Abrams Piano Concerto

Teddy Abrams has led the Louisville Orchestra since 2014, building a reputation for genre-crossing programming that pulls in bluegrass, jazz and American vernacular music alongside the standard orchestral repertoire, an approach that shapes his own composing as much as his conducting. His Piano Concerto, written for Wang, moves through a swing-era big-band overture, virtuosic solo cadenzas, Latin jazz-inflected passages, boogie-woogie and gospel- and Broadway-adjacent writing, a concerto that treats American vernacular idioms as source material for a large-scale concert work rather than as decoration around a more conventional classical structure. Recording it with his own orchestra, the same ensemble that gave the work its premiere, gives the performance a lived-in familiarity that a guest orchestra encountering the score for the first time couldn’t match.

About Michael Tilson Thomas’s contribution

Michael Tilson Thomas is better known internationally as a conductor, long an advocate for American music, from Ives and Copland through to living composers, than as a composer himself, which makes You Come Here Often? an unusual credit on a major-label piano disc. Pairing a work by a conductor with deep American-repertoire advocacy alongside a genuinely new concerto by another American composer-conductor gives the disc a coherent identity: this isn’t a virtuoso soloist working through miscellaneous new commissions, but a specific, considered statement about where American concert music is now.

About the performers

Yuja Wang’s technical command is well established across her existing discography; what’s distinctive here is a soloist known for a fairly conservative core repertoire choosing to build an entire album around brand-new American concertante writing rather than folding a single novelty into a more conventional programme. The Louisville Orchestra, founded in 1937 and long known for commissioning new American work under a series of adventurous music directors, is a genuinely apt partner for this repertoire rather than a orchestra-for-hire encountering it cold.

Why this matters for Wang’s own discography

Wang has recorded extensively for Deutsche Grammophon across a career built substantially on 19th- and 20th-century Russian and French repertoire, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Ravel among her most closely associated composers on disc. An album built entirely around brand-new American concertante writing, with no established repertoire piece anywhere on the programme, is a genuinely different kind of project for her rather than a continuation of an existing recording pattern, and the Grammy recognition suggests the gamble paid off critically as well as artistically.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh by the mmmusic team, covering a real, current recording rather than reproducing an original mmmusic critic’s words. It isn’t part of the site’s recovered 1991–2018 archive, but new coverage extending the same kind of close, factual attention to what’s actually being recorded and awarded today. Every fact above, the Grammy win, the two composers, the premiere history, has been independently checked against multiple sources rather than assumed.