54th Annual Grammy Award Nominees Named
The Recording Academy has announced the nominees for the 54th annual Grammy Awards. A complete listing of the 78 award categories, sortable by genre, is available here.
Perhaps the most prestigious of the composer-oriented awards is Best Contemporary Classical Composition and four of the five contenders for that award are Americans: Robert Aldridge, for his opera Elmer Gantry; George Crumb for The Ghosts Of Alhambra; Jefferson Friedman for his String Quartet No. 3; and Steven Mackey for Lonely Motel – Music From Slide. (The remaining candidate is Poul Ruders, one of Denmark’s most celebrated living composers.) However, there is also an award for Best Instrumental Composition whose nominees include John Hollenbeck’s Falling Men. The performance of Mackey’s Grammy-nominated composition will compete with the performances on a disc devoted to the music of Gabriela Lena Frank for the Best Small Ensemble Performance prize.
Recordings of works by Joseph Schwantner (a new recording of his Percussion Concerto featuring Christopher Lamb) and John Corigliano (a recital disc by Ursula Oppens) are among the nominees for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. An all-Eric Whitacre disc featuring the Eric Whitacre Singers will duke it out for Best Choral Performance against a disc by the U.K.’s Choir of Trinity College Cambridge devoted to unaccompanied choral works by composers from North America including Frank Ferko, Stephen Paulus, and Steven Stucky. Randy Brecker, Ron Carter, Chick Corea, Fred Hersch, and Sonny Rollins will all be vying for Best Improvised Jazz Solo; new albums by Corea, Hersch, and Rollins are all additionally among the nominees for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. Among the other Grammy category nominees are the Metropolitan Opera’s DVD recording of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic (one of two commercially available video recordings of the work) for Best Opera Recording, and the original cast album for the 2011 Tony Award-winning Best Musical, The Book of Mormon (featuring a score by Robert Lopez, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone), will compete against cast albums for recent revivals of two universally acknowledged classics of the genre: Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and Frank Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying for Best Musical Theater Album.
The televised portion of the awards ceremony will be broadcast live from the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 12, 2012 (8:00 p.m. ET) on CBS.