Back in the 1970s and ’80s, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra used to ride to easy victory, year after year, with music director Georg Solti lashing it across the finish line. Other maestros often nominated (if not always the big winners) were Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan. Violinist Itzhak Perlman almost invariably fiddled to triumph in the best instrumental soloist category–that is, in the years when Vladimir Horowitz was not there first. Kathleen Battle often had the best vocal performance category sewn up.
With today’s classical Grammy Awards, it’s a different ballgame.
Bernstein, Karajan and Horowitz are gone; Solti and Perlman are making far fewer recordings than in years past; and Battle’s bad-girl reputation apparently has made her a hot potato, as far as the record labels are concerned.
Yes, the CSO still garners annual nominations in more than one category, but nowadays it’s the recordings our orchestra makes under principal guest conductor Pierre Boulez–not music director Daniel Barenboim or music director laureate Solti that take the palm.
In this year’s Grammys, to be announced Wednesday (7 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2), Boulez is nominated in four categories, and his latest Bartok release, which couples the “Miraculous Mandarin” ballet and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, could very well bring the CSO its 54th and 55th Grammys, in the best classical album and best orchestral performance categories.
Solti and Barenboim, however, are conspicuous by their absence from the list of Grammy finalists. The closest Barenboim came this year was a sideline mention in the best classical producer category, in which Teldec’s Martin Sauer was nominated for his work on the Barenboim/Berlin Staatsoper recording of Strauss’ “Elektra.” Curiouser and curiouser.
As for Sir Georg, it seems likely that the voting members of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, the body that awards the Grammys, feel that, with 30 Grammy awards to his credit–more than any other recording artist, pop or classical–Solti’s mantle is already groaning with statuettes; so, enough, already. His most recent Grammy for a CSO recording was in 1991 for Bach’s B-Minor Mass.
Which doesn’t make it any less odd that Boulez has replaced Solti as the conductorial apple of Grammy’s eye. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, when Boulez recorded for CBS (now Sony Classical), his recordings sold in modest dribs and drabs. Now that he has switched to DG, the company has invested heavily in promoting the former guru of the European musical avant-garde as a mainstream maestro, and his market image–and sales–have benefited as a result.
Also, the Grammy folks seem very partial to Boulez’s ongoing, commercially and artistically successful Bartok cycle with the CSO. A good many Bartok recordings–also Prokofiev and Shostakovich–are turning up as Grammy finalists these days. Never mind Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Puccini and all the other standard-repertory composers. These days Grammy smiles more favorably on accessible living American composers–most notably John Corigliano, John Adams, Philip Glass–whose music sells tickets and often makes it to the top of the Billboard charts.
Still, the absence of big-ticket conductors such as Barenboim, Claudio Abbado, Kurt Masur, Bernard Haitink, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Riccardo Chailly, Riccardo Muti, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Colin Davis and Seiji Ozawa from the Grammy lists is glaring. It seems clear that even a mediocre CD by Boulez, Leonard Slatkin, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Michael Tilson Thomas, Simon Rattle, John Eliot Gardiner and Nikolaus Harnoncourt–the golden elite in the eyes of today’s Grammy jury–is more likely to grab a Grammy nomination than a prestige release from one of the above-named conductors. Why? The heavily promoted Boulez, Rattle (et al.) sell; the others don’t.
On that sobering note, let’s move on to the classical Grammy predictions.
– In the categories of best classical album and best orchestral performance, it appears likely that Boulez and the CSO will walk off with their sixth and seventh joint awards for their latest Bartok album. The much-touted Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, a nominee for the past two years, deserves to win in the former category for his DG disc of opera arias. Boulez is represented by a second album on DG–a fine, challenging disc of works by the mystical modernist Olivier Messiaen, with the Cleveland Orchestra.
Another Bartok disc, which contains the three piano concertos with Yefim Bronfman as soloist, trails the pack as best classical album. So do Slatkin’s excellent collection of Aaron Copland symphonies on RCA; the same conductor’s RCA recording of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 with the National Symphony Orchestra; and Gil Shaham’s splendid coupling of the Prokofiev violin concertos on DG.
Works by two deceased senior European modernists–Witold Lutoslawski’s Symphony No. 2, with Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony); and the Messiaen/Boulez album–share the best orchestral performance category with Tilson Thomas’ San Francisco Symphony recording of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” excerpts and with Yuri Temirkanov’s account of the Shostakovich “Leningrad” Symphony (both RCA). At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I’ll take Boulez/Bartok. This would be sweet victory for the home team, which was shut out last year when a CD of Debussy works with Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra swept the top two classical categories.
The best opera category this year is studded with unusual suspects. These include Dallapiccola’s “Il Prigioniero” (Salonen conducting, on Sony), Britten’s “Peter Grimes” (Chandos) and the obscure Danish classical composer Friedrich Ludwig Kunzen’s “Holger Danske (Ogier the Dane),” on Da Capo. I suspect the Grammy jury will choose Harnoncourt’s typically risk-taking account of Weber’s “Der Freischuetz,” on Teldec, over any of its competitors.
Still, if I were a Grammy jurist, I’d cast my vote for any of three excellent opera sets that weren’t even nominated: the Barenboim/Berlin “Elektra” mentioned above; Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel,” with Valery Gergiev leading Kirov Opera forces (Philips); or Erwin Schulhoff’s lushly alluring “Flammen,” one of the most significant releases to date in London’s Entartete Musik series.
Handicapping best choral performance is easy: The award will go to Gardiner’s charming disc of Percy Grainger songs and ballads, a Philips disc that has figured on everybody’s best-of-1996 list. The competitors here include Volume One of Ton Koopman’s Bach cantata series, on Erato; Mozart’s Requiem, under William Christie (Erato); and Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast,” Andrew Litton conducting, on London.
Inexplicably nominated was Carlo Maria Giulini’s dull, somnolent reading of the Schubert Mass in E-flat, on Sony. Why past Grammy favorite Kent Nagano’s splendid Erato set of Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust” did not wind up a finalist is beyond me.
Bronfman’s Bartok piano concertos and Shaham’s Prokofiev violin concertos also turn up in the best instrumental soloist with orchestra category. Grammy’s nod to new American Minimalism, in the form of John Adams’ lyrical, engrossing Violin Concerto, played by Gidon Kremer (Nonesuch), also is vying in this category; so are Alfred Brendel’s performance of the Schoenberg Piano Concerto (Philips) and Truls Mork’s readings of the two Shostakovich cello concertos (Virgin Classics).
I expect Shaham, a Grammy favorite, to win. But the Adams concerto doesn’t deserve to be shut out and probably won’t be ignored. I predict it will win as best classical contemporary composition, chugging easily over nominated works by Corigliano, Colin Matthews, Einojuhani Rautavaara and Gunther Schuller.
Bronfman turns up again in the best solo instrumental lineup, this time for his Sony disc of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 2, 3, 5 and 9. He faces formidable competition from keyboard titans of several generations. There are 81-year-old Earl Wild’s Sony recital, “The Romantic Master”; 1996 Grammy winner Radu Lupu playing Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” and “Kinderszenen,” on London; and, at the opposite end of the age spectrum, young Evgeny Kissin’s performances of the Schumann Fantasy and Liszt “Transcendental Etudes.” Alan Feinberg’s disc of Charles Wuorinen and Morton Feldman piano works on Koch is a dark-horse entry in a year of tough choices. Although Lupu is the most deserving, I have a feeling the prize will go to Kissin.
The fiery pianist Martha Argerich has two recordings nominated for best chamber music performance: a disc of Beethoven violin-piano sonatas with Kremer (DG) and a live anthology of Schumann chamber works (EMI). Assuming the two Argerich issues will cancel each other out, I suspect the Grammy voters will choose the EMI issue of Brahms’ “Liebeslieder Waltzes,” with singers Barbara Bonney, Anne Sofie von Otter, Kurt Streit and Olaf Bar, over another Brahms disc, the two cello sonatas played by Anner Bylsma, on Sony; and Corigliano’s String Quartet (Telarc).
Violinist Kremer deserves to triumph–and probably will do so–in the best small ensemble performance category, with his delicious “Hommage a Piazzolla” disc on Nonesuch, one of the best of the year’s umpteen tango releases. A varied lot of also-rans includes chamber works by Boulez, performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain under the composer’s direction (DG); Colin Matthews’ “Suns Dance,” with Oliver Knussen leading the London Sinfonietta (also DG); Shostakovich works for chamber orchestra (New Albion); and a Vivaldi concerto collection on Tactus.
There are several glaring omissions in the best vocal performance category. Why didn’t mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli make the cut with her marvelous album of French songs, “Chant d’amour” (London)? I would have nominated the young British tenor Ian Bostridge for his marvelous rendition of “Die schoene Muellerin,” part of Hyperion’s ambitious Schubert song edition. Dawn Upshaw and Kathleen Battle–who have won past Grammys–also failed to secure nominations.
As it turns out, both American sopranos were edged out by four up-and-coming native singers. They are soprano Lorraine Hunt, who takes the eponymous role in Britten’s “Phaedra,” on Erato; Sanford Sylvan, whose Faure song disc on Nonesuch should delight lovers of French melodies; Renee Fleming, whose Mozart aria album on London shows this major artist at her best; and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore, with a Handel-Mozart program on Teldec. Rounding out the category are Terfel with his aforementioned DG release of opera arias, and an anthology of little-known Swedish songs as sung by mezzo von Otter, another past Grammy favorite. And the winner? Fleming, by a semiquaver.
