Grammys delayed again due to COVID

For the second straight year, the Grammy Awards are being postponed due to COVID. Whether the judges selecting the Best Orchestral Performance get a correspondingly extended deadline has not been announced.

They could use one. Aside from the usual difficulties in choosing the best of five outstanding performances, this year’s deliberations come freighted with a confounding level of diversity.

On the traditionalist front are recordings of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra and Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy by the Seattle Symphony (Seattle Symphony Media) and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 by the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh ­Symphony Orchestra (Reference Recordings).

Ticking the living-composers box, there’s the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s recording of John Adams’ My Father Knew Charles Ives and Harmonielehre (Naxos) and the San Francisco Symphony’s recording of Nico Muhly’s 18-minute, single-­movement Throughline (Warner Classics)—the latter of which, incidentally, was “composed especially for the legal and physical restrictions made necessary by the COVID-19 virus” and therefore also ticks the zeitgeist box.

Finally, as if the competition weren’t appley-to-orangey enough, there’s the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of Florence Price’s ­Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 (Deutsche Grammophon), a performance whose appeal is extra-musically bolstered by the recently rediscovered Price’s au courant status as the first significant 20th-century composer who was also a woman of color.

Of course, if the voters adhere to the guidelines implicit in the term best orchestral performance, neither the works’ inherent qualities nor their composers’ current cachet should matter.

It should be possible, for example, for a panel of experts to conclude that the Yannick Nézet-Séguin–conducted Philadelphia Orchestra “outperformed” the Manfred Honek–conducted Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra regardless of whether Beethoven’s Ninth—at one time considered unplayable (and unsingable) as written—places greater demands on an orchestra and its conductor than Price’s pastorally lyrical, Dvořák-­inspired symphonies ever could.

A piece’s difficulty, in other words, should not excuse the shortcomings of its interpreters.

But what if, after careful deliberation, the experts conclude that Honeck and the PSO interpreted Beethoven just fine? What chance would the recordings of works by Price, Muhly, Adams, or Strauss and Scriabin stand then?

And even if the Thomas Dausgaard–­conducted Seattle Symphony were determined to have matched or exceeded the efforts of their Pittsburgh counterparts, would the slightly superior audio resulting from the latter’s having been recorded in a studio give it the edge over the former, which was recorded live in concert?

And how might Muhly’s Throughline, a lean, ever-morphing piece that emphasizes individual orchestra members (and at times individual orchestra nonmembers) instead of the collective, stack up? “It’s easy,” Muhly has said, “to get lost in the idea that the orchestra is just this one gigantic roomful of people making a bunch of noise.”

Yet isn’t that idea, or some version of it anyway, the one in which the classical vetters are supposed to get lost?

Having to listen repeatedly to five wonderful recordings sounds like nice work if you can get it. This year, however, the temptation to envy is easy to resist.