The Score | Classical Grammy Awards: Bates, Blanchard, Fuchs, Kernis, Shostakovich

Orchestras on opposite coasts were classical winners at the 61st annual Grammy Awards in February. The Boston Symphony Orchestra won Best Orchestral Performance for its recording of Shostakovich Symphony Nos. 4 and 11, led by Music Director Andris Nelsons. The Seattle Symphony’s recording of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Violin Concerto, led by Music Director Ludovic Morlot with soloist James Ehnes, won Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Best Classical Compendium went to Kenneth Fuchs’s Piano Concerto (“Spiritualist”), Poems of Life, Glacier, and Rush, with JoAnn Falletta conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and pianist Jeffrey Biegel, countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, electric guitarist D.J. Sparr, and alto saxophonist Timothy McAllister. Best Opera winner was Santa Fe Opera, with Mason Bates’s The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Terence Blanchard’s Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) won Best Instrumental Composition in the composing/arranging category.