I have found that the Grammies are a point of reference for the “outside world” about classical artists, that is, a way to let people who haven’t heard of a certain artist know he or she is “that good”. Sometimes, I’ll meet someone and the conversation will go like this: 

What do you do? Classical music PR.

Oh, that’s cool. Name someone you work for. Is it? And…Hilary Hahn?

Mmmm…don’t know her. She’s a violinist. Mmm…. She played for the Pope’s 80th birthday. Weird, OK…. She played on ‘The Village’ soundtrack. I loved ‘Sixth Sense’. She won a Grammy. Oh! Cool, great, yeah.

Amanda continues:

… the Grammies are a cultural touchstone – is this the right use of that phrase? – or, perhaps more accurately, a popular culture mile marker of success. What is that worth, though, monetarily speaking, slash, what does winning a Grammy mean for an artist’s overall profile? 

Both The Kings Singers and Hilary have won Grammies before, so I already get to slap “Grammy Award-winning…” next to their names in their bios and pop-culture-mile-marker-of-success name-drop “Grammy” to folks outside the industry.** BUT – would Grammy wins this year result in, oh, what’s the word – “album sales”? Does a shiny Grammy sticker on an album make the difference (it might), or is there more we can do to channel the win of a mainstream award into recording and concert revenue?

You’ll notice that Amanda used her blog cleverly, not failing to mention that two of her private clients—Hillary Hahn and The King Singers—received nominations. Brava.

It is easy to complain about the relevance of an award that doesn’t have the prestige, in the “classical world,” of the Grawemeyer or Pulitzer; but the GRAMMY® Award, though still largely associated with pop music, is one of the most widely-recognized awards in the U.S. music business (and, I would even say, the world). And if we are attempting to reach new audiences with some of our artists and releases, having that award attached to their names is pretty important. Additionally, the award is a sales driver, which means a great deal to the music business even in bad times.

Naxos and our family of distributed labels saw many of our wonderful artists nominated this year, including the Pacifica Quartet, whose recording of Elliott Carter’s String Quartets Nos. 1 and 5 was nothing short of astonishing. It also was fitting that this nomination came just before Mr. Carter’s 100th birthday this Thursday, December 11. The Quartet was nominated in the category of Best Chamber Music Performance and also will be honored at this year’s Musical America Awards with the 2009 Ensemble of the Year Award. And for everyone who has been asking about Volume 2 of the Carter Quartets, here goes: FEBRUARY 2009. BTW: Legendary producer Judith Sherman also picked up a nomination for Producer of the Year for her work on the Carter String Quartets on Naxos and four additional albums.

John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man received a nomination for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. For this recording, Corigliano, a Pulitzer-, Oscar-, Grammy®-, and Grawemeyer award-winning composer (yes, there are all those award listings and they ALL are important), collaborated with conductor JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic. In addition, the recording’s superb soloist, Israeli soprano Hila Plitmann, received a nomination for Best Classical Vocal Performance. She has made recordings of works by David Del Tredici, including Vintage Alice and some of his songs. For Mr. Tambourine Man, because of the re-orchestration—the work was originally written for Sylvia McNair and scored for voice and piano—the vocal part was reconceived for “amplified soprano.” Plitmann is amazing.

Chorus master Henryk Wojnarowski and conductor Antoni Wit received a Choral Performance nomination for the Naxos recording of Karol Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater with the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. A Best Engineered Album (Classical) nomination went to engineer John Newton for his work on the Naxos recording Respighi: Church Windows, Brazilian Impressions, Rossiniana, featuring conductor JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

Our distributed labels also did amazingly well this year.

Artists from British-based label Chandos received five nominations in multiple categories. Spotless Rose: Hymns to the Virgin Mary, featuring the Phoenix Chorale, conductor Charles Bruffy, and produced by Blanton Alspaugh, was nominated for Best Classical Album (Awards to Artists and Producer). Additionally, Mr. Bruffy and the Phoenix Chorale received a nod in the Best Small Ensemble Performance category. Spotless Rose includes choral works by Stephen Paulus, Benjamin Britten, Cecilia McDowall, Herbert Howells, Javier Busto, Healey Willan, and Jean Belmont Ford. On a personal level, I need to add that this recording is a special favorite among many of us at Naxos.

Another Chandos choral recording, Rheinberger: Sacred Choral Works, with conductor Charles Bruffy leading the Kansas City Chorale and Phoenix Bach Choir, earned nominations for Best Surround Sound Album and Best Choral Performance. Finally, a Best Orchestral Performance nomination went to conductor Rumon Gamba and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra for their Chandos recording D’Indy Orchestral Works, Volume 1.

A EuroArts production earned two nominations in the categories of Best Classical Album (Award to Artists and Producers) and Best Opera Recording (Award to Conductor, Producer, and Principal Soloists) for the DVD recording of Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of The City of Mahagonny. The performance featured conductor James Conlon, soloists Anthony Dean Griffey, Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald, and the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and Chorus, produced by Fred Vogler. (This is the first year DVD recordings of operas are eligible for Grammy Awards. Only the audio portion of the DVD is considered in the nominating process.”)

Nominations for Best Opera Recording also went to conductors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs for their CPO recording of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Psyché with the Boston Early Music Festival. Mr. O’Dette and Mr. Stubbs also were nominated last year for their CPO recording of Lully’s Thésée with the same ensemble.

Renowned Italian conductor and Baroque specialist Rinaldo Alessandrini was nominated for his Naïve classique recording of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo.

Finally, violinist Elmar Oliveira earned a nomination for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra for his Artek recording of Violin Concertos by Ernst Bloch and Benjamin Lees, with John McLaughlin Williams conducting the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.

On October 28, Naxos released The Christopher Nupen Films’ new documentary, Vladimir Ashkenazy: Master Musician. Nupen, dubbed “king of the music documentary” by Gramophone and a three-time winner at Midem in Cannes (2005, 2006, and 2008), has put together a revealing portrait of the Russian-born pianist and conductor. The film includes Vladimir Ashkenazy: The Vital Juices Are Russian (1968); a montage of Nupen’s composer films with Ashkenazy as conductor; and a performance segment featuring Rachmaninoff’s Corelli Variations, released for the first time on this disc. Additionally, the DVD features a short interview with Ashkenazy.

The Vital Juices Are Russian was shot in 1968 when Ashkenazy moved with his wife and son from London to Iceland. The title refers to a statement about the composer’s Russian-ness that he makes during the film. Mr. Nupen comments: “The portrait film was made at an important turning point in Vladimir Ashkenazy’s life and career, a time when everything was changing, much to do and much being done. Some piquancy was added by the fact that our young hero felt that he was struggling to come to terms with the great traditions of the West, because, as he says in the film, he felt inadequately prepared. At that time, the idea that he might, somewhere in the distant future, become an internationally-recognized conductor was not even on the horizon.”

Since the original film was made, Ashkenazy-possibly the most frequently-recorded pianist in history, with a discography of 56 pages-has also become an international conductor. The DVD includes a montage of sequences from Nupen’s composer films featuring Ashkenazy at the podium. Next is a short but revealing interview with the composer on music and musical gifts and, finally, a segment on Rachmaninoff’s Corelli Variations, which Ashkenazy discusses at length. The film concludes with a complete performance of the piece, filmed live at a public concert in Lugano.

Ashkenazy won the Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians Prize at age 18 and later won the Tchaikovsky competition. That was only the start, however; his career has continued to rise steadily from then until now. In 2007, he celebrated his 70th birthday, an event that inspired worldwide press celebrations and an eight-disc boxed set of CDs from Decca; the final disc is an 80-minute conversation between Ashkenazy and Christopher Nupen.

Christopher Nupen is the recent recipient of myriad awards, including DVD of the Month from both Classic FM and Gramophone; three German Record Critics’ Awards; the Diapason d’Or (France); and, most recently, the DVD of the Year Award (documentary category) from Midem at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes for Jacqueline du Pré – A Celebration. This is Nupen’s third Midem DVD of the Year Award in four years, an unprecedented achievement; it is the top international classical DVD prize awarded by the institution. Founded in 1968, Christopher Nupen’s company Allegro Films has produced significant documentaries on Vladimir Ashkenazy, Evgeny Kissin, Nathan Milstein, Franz Schubert, Andrés Segovia, Jean Sibelius, and Pinchas Zukerman. Through close relationships with these artists, Allegro Films has produced a series of intimate portraits recognized as classics, with a longevity rarely achieved in television programming.

 David Oistrakh, Artist of the People? (Medici 3073178) is the latest film by acclaimed French filmmaker and violinist Bruno Monsaingeon (Glenn Gould Hereafter; Nadia Boulanger: Mademoiselle). One of the greatest violinists of the 20th century, David Oistrakh (1908-1974) was largely self-taught, yet he became the true founder and undisputed master of the Soviet school of violin-playing, the most prestigious school of our times. The film includes rare archival footage (on and offstage) gathered over many years by Monsaingeon, whose fascination with Oistrakh dates back to his childhood. In addition to performances by David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Sviatoslav Richter, Igor Oistrakh and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (among others), the filmmaker spoke at length with Menuhin, Rostropovich, and the violinist’s son Igor.

Some of the stories related by Rostropovich and Menuhin chillingly reveal the exceptionally troubled circumstances in which Oistrakh lived. Despite being Jewish, Oistrakh refused to leave Soviet Russia even when emigration may have been possible. The interviews shed light on a man who, like his contemporary Dimitri Shostakovich, found ways to survive during the dark years of Stalin.

Because of the political climate of the time-Stalinism and the Second World War-Oistrakh’s career in Western Europe, America, and Japan blossomed relatively late. It was not until 1953 that he began to make regular appearances in the West, by which time he was already 45 years old-though his legendary reputation had already made him the subject of endless speculation throughout the Western musical world. His first proper international tours instantly confirmed the legend, and from then until his death in Amsterdam in 1974, he pursued a varied career in the concert hall, as a soloist and conductor, and as a teacher. Oistrakh’s genius inspired numerous composers to write for him. He premiered sonatas and concertos by Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Shostakovich, among others, and performed these works all over the world.

 Tony Palmer writes: “There are always dates which resonate forever in our lives … for me that date is May 30, 1962. By chance, I had been taken to Coventry Cathedral by a friend, John Culshaw, to hear a ‘big new choral piece’ by Benjamin Britten, whose entire works Culshaw was in the process of committing to disc by Decca.” The work to which Palmer refers, of course, is Britten’s War Requiem, one of the most important works to come out of the later half of the 20th century. Palmer went on to make a film in 1967 about the opening of the original Snape Concert Hall called Britten & His Festival. Britten was so taken with that film that after his death, his longtime partner Sir Peter Pears asked Palmer to make another, more substantive film in his memory.

 Benjamin Britten: A Time There Was (1979) is as much a love story as it is a biography. Pears’ commentary and conversation provide the central focus for the film, which also includes numerous musical excerpts from Britten’s operas and other works and features artists who include Leonard Bernstein, Kathleen Ferrier, Dame Janet Baker, Sviatoslav Richter (another Russian champion of Britten’s music), Julian Bream, Peter Glossop, John Shirley-Quirk, and others. The film also highlights the more personal side of the composer, with commentary from Britten’s housekeeper Miss Hudson, Rita Thompson (who nursed him through his final illness), his copyist and musical confidants Imogen Holst and Rosamund Strode, and the Mayer family who housed Britten and Peter Pears when the two left England in 1938 in objection to the war.

Palmer says, “I could never repay my debt to him, but I hoped (and hope) the film would enable others to share something of this strange, haunted man, and his enduring power for us. Humphrey Carpenter once played the Young Person’s Guide on his program In Tune on Radio3. Following the tumultuous fugue at the end, there was a long pause, and eventually Humphrey said: ‘That, ladies and gentlemen, is pure genius.’ Yes, it is.”‘

This podcast looks at their brand new recording of Hymns to the Virgin Mary.

The interesting thing about this CD is that all of the music was written in the 20th century, including music by four composers who are still very much alive and composing.

Album details…
Catalogue No.: CHSA 5066

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In the past 20 years, he has made an astonishing 280 recordings. In this interview he talks about this relationship, plus his latest project, a recording of Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave.

Album details…
Catalogue No.: CHAN 10473(2)