NEWS: LA Opera wins two Grammy Awards

By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Southern California News Group

Los Angeles Opera’s production of John Corigliano’s The Ghost of Versailles in 2015 captured Grammy Awards today for both Best Opera Recording and Best Engineered Classical Album in 2016.

The PentaTone CD, which was the first recording of Corigliano’s opera, was conducted by LAO Music Director James Conlon. It starred Patricia Racette as Marie Antoinette and Patti Lupone as Turkish entertainer Samira, among others. The CD was recorded live in February 2015 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It was engineered by Mark Donahue and Fred Vogler.

This is Conlon’s second double-Grammy winner with LA Opera. He and the company won in 2009 for Best Classical Album and Best Opera Recording for LAO’s production of Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

The LA Opera recording beat four other finalists in each category. Among those in the Best Engineered Classical Album category was Shostakovich: Under Stalin’s Shadow Symphonies Nos. 5, 8 & 9, with Andris Nelsons leading the Boston Symphony, which won the Grammy for Best Orchestral Recording.

In the Best Opera Recording category, LAO beat out a Santa Fe Opera production of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain, which was conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, former associate conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
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(c) Copyright 2017, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.

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