Old and new

Generally speaking, for classical musicians even to be signed to a recording deal, they have to have demonstrated such a high level of talent that the odds of their making a bad or even a boring album are extremely long.

Their odds of making an undistinguished album, on the other hand, are high. Of the more than 2,000 classical albums that were released in 2017, many comprise oft-recorded works from the standard Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th-century repertoires, exponentially diminishing their chances of standing out.

All this talk of odds and chances makes one wonder how the classical albums that won Grammys in January came to be selected. How many members of the Recording Academy, for instance, voted? What were their credentials? Is it remotely possible that they listened to more than a sliver of the eligible selections?

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5; Barber: Adagio (Reference), a live recording by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra as conducted by Manfred Honeck, won twice, for Best Engineered Album, Classical, and Best Orchestral Performance. A powerful recording of a striking and historically significant work, its engineering and performance might really have been the best of the year.

But a recording that included Shostakovich’s Fifth, Under Stalin’s Shadow by the Andris Nelsons–conducted Boston Symphony Orchestra, also won the Best Orchestral Performance Grammy last year, provoking one sarcastic commenter on a classical-music website to quip, “I didn’t realize so much could be said in Shostakovich 5.”

To be fair, Under Stalin’s Shadow also contained Shostakovich 8 and 9, whereas Honeck’s album pairs Shostakovich 5 with Barber’s Adagio for Strings. So the contexts in which one encounters the two Shostakovich 5s are somewhat different.

But other than the fact that Honeck takes the first of the symphony’s four movements a little more slowly than Nelsons did, there’s no solid reason to prefer one performance over the other. Each does justice to the work’s invisibly quiet stretches, its emotionally shattering crescendos, and the anti-socialist realism of its defiantly playful second movement. Again, any orchestra that’s talented and well-conducted enough to have its recording of such a complex piece released at all is unlikely to make a botch of things.

The album that won the Grammy for Best Opera Recording—Hans Graf and the Houston Symphony’s recording of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (Naxos) featuring Roman Trekel (Wozzeck), Anne Schwanewilms (Marie), and Gordon Gietz (the Drum Major)—is another interesting case.

The performers bring to harrowing life Berg’s tragic tale of a common man driven to madness and murder by the mounting social, financial, and emotional consequences of his having fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman of easy virtue. But can Graf’s Wozzeck really be said to supersede, to cite just one example, the 1988 Wozzeck conducted by Claudio Abbado and featuring as Marie the magnificent Hildegard Behrens? How many masterly versions of a masterpiece, in other words, does one need?

Perhaps the Classical Grammys function most usefully when they draw attention to works too new to be over-recorded. A case in point is this year’s Best Choral Performance winner, Gavin Bryars: The Fifth Century (ECM) by the 31-member vocal ensemble the Crossing and the saxophone quartet PRISM.

A fascinatingly otherworldly setting of seven devoutly mystical meditations by the 17th-century Anglican Thomas Traherne and two sonnets by Petrarch, The Fifth Century contains few if any traces of the minimalistic techniques that characterized Bryars’ best-known work, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Instead, it weds text to sound with an intimacy so intense that the resulting whole transcends them both.