21C Media Group congratulates 2025 Grammy nominees Marin Alsop, Jon Batiste, Julia Bullock, Yo-Yo Ma, Nicholas Phan, London Symphony Orchestra, & Warner/Erato’s Joyce DiDonato
(November 2024) — 21C Media Group congratulates artists including conductor Marin Alsop, singers Julia Bullock and Nicholas Phan, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jon Batiste, the London Symphony Orchestra, and Warner Classics / Erato’s Joyce DiDonato on their nominations for the 67th annual Grammy Awards, announced this week by the Recording Academy. The awards will be presented on February 2, 2025 in a Los Angeles ceremony that will air live on CBS TV and stream live on Paramount+.
A long-time collaborator of composer John Adams, MacArthur award winner and five-time Grammy nominee MARIN ALSOP recorded Adams: City Noir, Fearful Symmetries & Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, of which she is Chief Conductor. Nominated for “Best Orchestral Performance,” the album combines Adams’s City Noir and Fearful Symmetries with the premiere recording of Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance, a work he dedicated to the conductor herself. As BBC Music magazine writes, “Alsop guides this programme of ultra-American music by John Adams with typical dedication and vim.”
Five-time Grammy winner JON BATISTE scored new nods in two categories this season. American Symphony, which chronicles his life during the composition of an orchestral work of the same name, has been nominated for “Best Music Film.” Directed by Matthew Heineman and produced by Lauren Domino, Matthew Heineman, and Joedan Okun, the documentary – a New York Times “Critic’s Pick” – was released by Netflix in partnership with the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions. In addition, “It Never Went Away,” the song Batiste wrote and produced for the film, is a nominee for the “Best Song Written for Visual Media.” Created in collaboration with Grammy winner Dan Wilson, the song also earned a 2023 Academy Award nomination for “Best Original Song.”
It was Grammy winner JULIA BULLOCK who created the role of Dame Shirley in the world premiere production of Girls of the Golden West, John Adams’s opera about the California gold rush of 1849. Singing alongside Paul Appleby, Hye Jung Lee, Daniela Mack, Elliot Madore, Ryan McKinny, and Davóne Tines with the composer conducting, Bullock reprises the same leading role on the opera’s first recording, a double album heralded as “definitive” by The Guardian. A nominee for “Best Opera Recording,” the Nonesuch release also received nominations for Alexander and Dmitriy Lipay in the “Best Engineered Album, Classical” category, and is one of those for which Dmitriy Lipay has been nominated for “Producer of the Year, Classical.”
On Maestro: Music by Leonard Bernstein – the soundtrack to Maestro (2023), the Oscar-nominated film about Leonard Bernstein’s relationship with his wife – the LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA performs excerpts from the composer’s own works, and those of Beethoven, Mahler, Schumann, and Walton, under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and, in one instance, the film’s writer, director, producer, and star, Bradley Cooper. Marking the first Grammy nomination in the orchestra’s long and venerable history, the Deutsche Grammophon release is a nominee for “Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media.”
Representing the 31st nomination for 19-time Grammy winner YO-YO MA, Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 4 And Op. 97, “Archduke” is a nominee for “Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.” Recorded for Sony Classical with violinist Leonidas Kavakos and pianist Emanuel Ax, the album – like the supergroup’s two previous Beethoven for Three releases – challenges the traditional distinction between chamber and orchestral repertoire. With “an expansive, relaxed reading of the ‘Archduke’ and a truly exciting trio transmogrification of the Fourth Symphony” by Shai Wosner, the new title offers “music-making of great warmth from long-standing friends” (The Strad).
Already recognized with three previous Grammy nominations, tenor NICHOLAS PHANreceived two more this season. Recorded for Azica with jazz vocalist Farayi Malek and the Palaver Strings ensemble, A Change Is Gonna Come has been nominated for “Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.” Featuring Phan’s world premiere recording of a new commission from Errollyn Wallen, the collection explores America’s rich legacy of protest songs and is “curated and performed from the heart” (BBC Music). Phan has also been recognized for his starring role on the world premiere recording of Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater. A nominee for “Best Opera Recording,” the Deutsche Grammophon release captures the tenor’s live performance with the San Francisco Symphony, Fleur Barron, Axelle Fanyo, and Christopher Purves under Esa-Pekka Salonen’s leadership. This took place just days after Saariaho’s death, and the recording has also been nominated for “Best Contemporary Classical Composition,” honoring the late composer herself.
The WARNER CLASSICS & ERATO labels have received three nominations. Two of these are for three-time Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who was nominated in two different categories. Recorded with period-instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, her account of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder – offering “some of the finest Wagner singing out there” (Classical Explorer) – is a nominee for “Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.” Similarly, her acclaimed portrayal of Virginia Woolf on the premiere recording of Kevin Puts’s The Hours, captured live with soprano Renée Fleming and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, is a nominee for “Best Opera Recording.” In addition, producer Dirk Sobotka has been nominated for “Producer of the Year, Classical,” in part for his role in producing Erato’s Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 “From the New World,” American Suite. Marking conductor Nathalie Stutzmann’s debut release as Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and her first symphonic recording to date, the album “is a most promising sign of a fruitful collaboration between a great American orchestra and a conductor whose grasp is firm, coherent yet also sensitive and highly musical” (MusicWeb International).
Finally, two more 21C artists appear on Grammy-nominated recordings. PAAVO JÄRVIconducts Tanja Tetzlaff, Christian Tetzlaff, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin on Brahms, Viotti & Dvořák: Orchestral Works, one of the titles for which producer Christoph Franke is under consideration for “Producer of the Year, Classical.” Likewise, cellist INBAL SEGEV performs Timo Andres’s Upstate Obscura with the Metropolis Ensemble and conductor Andrew Cyr on Nonesuch’s Timo Andres’s The Blind Banister, for which engineers Silas Brown, Doron Schachter, and Michael Schwartz and mastering engineer Matt Colton have all been nominated for “Best Engineered Album, Classical.”