Corigliano’s Wins Lead a New Order

Living classical composers, without whom the rest of the Grammys couldn’t exist, are usually ghettoized into a single category for classical music. But not this year--John Corigliano, the 59-year-old American composer, was the evening’s big winner. His String Quartet received the award for best classical contemporary composition; its performance by the Cleveland String Quartet took best chamber music performance, and the recording of his First Symphony and choral piece, “Of Rage and Remembrance,” performed by the National Symphony Orchestra under its new music director, Leonard Slatkin, won the most important category of all--best classical album.

The Grammys also symbolized a new order in American orchestras by recognizing both this first recording of Slatkin with the National Symphony Orchestra and also by awarding best orchestral performance to Michael Tilson Thomas’ first disc as music director of the San Francisco Symphony--a suite from Prokofiev’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” However, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, nominated for three Grammys, earned only reflected glory--the Phil and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen accompanied Yefim Bronfman, who won best instrumental soloist (with orchestra) for the three Bartok piano concertos.

Pierre Boulez, a regular winner in orchestral performances in recent years, added one more, best small ensemble performance, for his recording of his own recent modernist work, “. . .explosante-fixe. . . ,” giving him a lifetime total of 19 Grammys.

The ceremonies included one classical performance, Gil Shaham impressively racing through the Scherzo movement of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto, with Charles Dutoit conducting. But the young American violinist failed to equal the excitement of Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov’s smoking rendition of a movement from a Shostakovich concerto last year or to win an award for his recording of the two Prokofiev concertos.