Commentary : Classical Grammys: A View From the Inside : NARAS inaugurates a new ballot procedure to break the cycle of rewarding only popular favorites

Kicking Grammy around isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

With one sweeping, controversial move the governors of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), which annually presents those little Grammy statuettes for excellence in a variety of music-related fields, have achieved a powerful measure of credibility for their beleaguered organization.

What differentiates the upcoming awards from those of the past is that NARAS, whose 6,000-plus voting membership of music industry professionals determines the Grammy honorees, has overhauled its classical selection process, choosing a sensible, somewhat elitist modus operandi over an established democratic system that, ironically, wound up rewarding only the Rich and Famous.

Come Wednesday, on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium, the classical Grammys will not automatically go to the artists whose publicists lobbied hardest on their behalf.

Question: Which of the following is/are likely to win a Grammy this year: Sir Georg Solti, Vladimir Horowitz (posthumously), Itzhak Perlman, Luciano Pavarotti, Jessye Norman? Sorry. All five are absent from the final ballot.

How did it come about? By excluding the voting rank and file from one crucial step in the awards process: the creation of the final ballot. That task was assigned by the NARAS directorate to an 11-member committee of veteran classical critics and other professional listeners.

What the 11 did was to reduce to manageable size an earlier ballot, with up to a dozen entries in each category, that had been determined by the broader NARAS membership. During our reduction process, the aforementioned favorites were dumped.

The next step, the final determination of winners, returns responsibility to the 6,000 voting members of NARAS. But how is that mass of humanity, most of it drawn from the pop end of the business and tending in the past to vote for the few classical names they know (i.e., previous winners), likely to react to this year’s gourmet menu?:

1. They may decide (or have decided, since the voting is over) to sit this one out.

2. They may vote silly, as this member annually (and legally) does when he crosses over to the Best Polka Recording category, to consort with the nominated likes of Lenny Gomulka’s Chicago Push Band.

3. They may cram the classics like crazy, to gain the knowledge required to make a meaningful choice. An option both unlikely and impractical.

Why did the Gang of 11 jettison those pre-ordained winners? Perhaps because they had proven too aggressively dominant. Or because their recordings in Calendar 1989 didn’t measure up to past performance. So, while our finalists this year do include such predictables as James Levine, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Shaw, Kathleen Battle and Placido Domingo, there are far more names that have not figured prominently in prior competitions.

For instance, superconductor Claudio Abbado stands a chance of winning his first ever Grammy, for his Deutsche Grammophon recording of “Wozzeck,” Alban Berg’s daunting 1920s opera.

Charles Dutoit, hardly a crossover icon, could cop a big one for his cognoscenti-pleasing Bartok program (London) with the Montreal Symphony. And contending for both best classical album and, less surprisingly, best chamber music recording, is the Emerson String Quartet for their Bartok (Deutsche Grammophon).

This year, small, gutsy companies are well-represented: Nonesuch, Delos, New World and, for the first time, Nimbus, which works out of a manor house in the Welsh countryside and is presided over by a sometime singer who alternatingly goes by the names of Shura Gehrman and Count Alexander Labinsky, which is a story in itself.

Last year, this column’s cynically simplistic predictions proved depressingly on target. The fat cats won in all categories. This time around, the mix is so catholic that the outcome is hearteningly unclear.

The best album prize may go to Herbert von Karajan, who in spite of being the most formidable (and best selling) podium personage of our time, has never been a major player in the Grammy sweepstakes. His chances are improved by the In Memoriam Factor (he recently died), added to the career-capping splendor of his interpretation, with the Vienna Philharmonic, of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony (Deutsche Grammophon).

L.A.-based Delos offers Karajan competition with 1989’s most unlikely best seller, music by American post-Romantic Howard Hanson, in performances by the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz. The equally esoteric Busoni Piano Concerto, with Garrick Ohlsson as soloist and Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting the Cleveland Orchestra (Telarc), is only a lukewarm contender, having failed to receive the publicity push that resulted from the Hanson’s surprise appearance on the Billboard charts.

On the other hand, Deutsche Grammophon’s Metropolitan Opera recording of Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” nominated in both the best album and best opera categories, could prevail in either or both, in response to the recognition factor working for conductor James Levine and the Met.

That opera category is, however, troubling--in spite of the big-money duds absent from it, e.g. Jessye Norman’s “Carmen.” Those that did make the final cut are the Seiji Ozawa/Boston Symphony production (Philips) of Richard Strauss’ “Elektra,” riddled with nasty, niggling cuts; the Levine-conducted Tchaikovsky “Eugene Onegin” (also Deutsche Grammophon) and “Walkure” which, with Abbado’s “Wozzeck,” are orchestrally resplendent but vocally variable; while Simon Rattle is only an intermittently convincing jazzman in the handsomely sung “Porgy and Bess” under his baton (Angel).

Sadly, the majority of us 11 power brokers turned deaf ears to operatic enterprise by eliminating from final consideration the exhaustively complete, vocally strong period performance of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” (London/L’Oiseau-Lyre), a reflection of the committee’s possible bias against the so-called “authenticity movement.” The majority also snubbed the first-ever recording of Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden’s flawed but enchanting “Paul Bunyan” (Virgin Classics).

The best orchestral performance grouping has, in addition to the aforementioned Hanson, Bartok and Bruckner (all doubling in the best album category), the radiant Leonard Bernstein-New York Philharmonic Mahler Third Symphony (again from Deutsche Grammophon). It would be a shoo-in if it weren’t up against Karajan/Bruckner. But then in this year of wonders, don’t count Seattle’s Hanson out. A vote for the final entry here, low-calorie Copland readings by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (yes, Deutsche Grammophon), is a vote wasted.

The Emerson Quartet’s Bartok is given a leg up for best chamber music recording by being, however tenuously, in best album contention. In the Chamber division it’s pitted against suave Beethoven (on Philips) by the Guarneri Quartet, which in its glorious quarter-century of existence has never won a Grammy; high-tension Beethoven from the glamorous Mutter-Giuranna-Rostropovich trio (Deutsche Grammophon); and a Shostakovich program illuminated by Isaac Stern, Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax (CBS). Emerson by a (bow) hair.

This year’s best instrumental soloist with orchestra lineup, a quintet of superb recordings, is astonishing for being devoted entirely to 20th-Century repertory. But it is Yo-Yo Ma’s celebrity, rather than his coupling of tough-nut concertos by Barber and Britten (CBS), that should make him the winner.

Ma’s competition comprises clarinetist David Shifrin’s Copland (Angel); Robert McDuffie playing violin concertos by William Schuman and Bernstein (Angel); violinist Gidon Kremer with music of Soviet avant-gardist Sofia Gubaidulina (Deutsche Grammophon); and Viktoria Mullova’s Prokofiev and Shostakovich violin concertos (Philips). Not a pianist in the bunch.

For best instrumental soloist without orchestra, four out of the five entrants are pianists, all so far removed from the world of hype that we must marvel at their having made it even to the ballot decimated by our deliberations: Andras Schiff for his Bach (London), Richard Goode’s Beethoven (Nonesuch), Chopin by Krystian Zimerman (Deutsche Grammophon), and the veteran Rudolf Firkusny in an unlikely recital of works by Bohuslav Martinu (RCA). Another old pro, cellist Janos Starker, plays virtuoso tidbits by the 19th-Century pedagogue David Popper (Delos). Courageous prognostication: A pianist will win.

Best classical vocal soloist: Domingo and/or Kathleen Battle have it made. Each has a solo album, his devoted to rare Puccini songs (CBS), hers to Schubert (Deutsche, yawn, Grammophon). And they offer a joint recital (DG again), with Levine conducting. Beat that for star power! One or both will prevail over William Sharp--young and indeed sharp--singing some luscious songs by Virgil Thomson (New World) and Dawn Upshaw for her Barber-Harbison-Menotti-Stravinsky program (Nonesuch).

The best choral performance listings have long been dominated by Robert Shaw and his Atlanta forces and they are in contention again, with their Britten “War Requiem” (Telarc). The competition is Elgar’s “The Kingdom,” from the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin (RCA); and the darkest of dark horses, an exquisite Vaughan Williams program sung by Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral Choir (Nimbus).

A couple of period Handel performances also made it, authenticity being deemed tolerable in choral music: a “Messiah” directed by Trevor Pinnock (DG) and “Jephtha” led by John Eliot Gardiner (Philips). The likely winner? Shaw, for always being there, with “The Kingdom” a possibility, mainly for the popular Slatkin’s involvement. Then again, everybody knows the Hallelujah Chorus.

In conclusion, sympathy is offered some other notables who didn’t make it to the finals: Mozart, Haydn, Schumann, Brahms and Verdi.

Better luck next year, guys.