Continuing what is likely a record-setting string of Grammy nominations and awards, San Francisco Symphony has received a Grammy Award Nomination for its live recording of Bernstein and Sondheim’s West Side Story. Conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and released on the symphony’s own SFS Media label, the recording includes performances by Alexandra Silber (Maria), Cheyenne Jackson (Tony), the fabulous Jessica Vosk (Anita), and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.
The potential win for Best Musical Theater Album pits SFS’s West Coast take on a very East Coast musical against four Original Broadway Cast albums: Aladdin, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
From an artistic standpoint, Grammy nominations from The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences are actually more significant than the awards themselves. This is because final Grammy nominations in craft and other specialized categories are determined by national nomination review committees, which are comprised of voting members from all of the Academyʼs chapter cities.
By contrast, final Grammy Award winners are determined by a vote of the entire membership of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Recording Academy members may vote in up to 20 categories in the genre fields plus the four categories of the General Field (Record Of The Year, Album Of The Year, Song Of The Year and Best New Artist.)
Reached at home, SFS’s Grammy-Award winning media producer/chief engineer, Jack Vad, shared some background on the symphony’s achievement. “First and foremost,” he said, “the entire project would not have happened without Michael.
“No other conductor in the world would have been able to get permission from the [Leonard Bernstein] estate to undertake a performance and recording of the complete score, which has been prohibited since Bernstein’s own recording in 1984. For me, it was such an extraordinary opportunity to record with Michael, who is probably No. 1 on anyone’s wish list of whom to conduct this work. Working on it with him was a great honor. Receiving the nomination further confirms our sense of the special and important quality of this production, which has become our most highly reviewed recording.”
It was also a tremendous recording challenge. Vad was not only dealing with soloists moving around in a semi-staged production, but also with recording from wireless headset microphones.
“There were a lot of issues in terms of vocal quality, which we wanted to record in high-resolution [96/24],” he says. “Our post-production mixes caused us to reinvent the wheel a bit, employing seldom-used digital hybrid technology that circumvents the limiting that goes on in wireless microphones. We were concerned about sound quality from the very beginning, because it would have been a showstopper to me to use the standard wireless technology. Instead, we recorded without compression, which is rare for show recordings.”
Equally impressive is the Symphony’s Grammy streak. Since MTT came on the scene, shortly after SFS received its first-ever Grammy Award, in 1993 for Orff’s Carmina Burana and two more in 1995, SFS has received seven Grammys for “Best Orchestral Performance,” two for “Best Classical Album,” two for “Best Engineered,” and one for “Best Choral Performance.” The Mahler recording cycle alone won seven awards. Altogether, SFS has received 18 nominations and 15 awards. Vad, it should be noted, produced the recording of John Adams Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Harmonielehre that won the 2012 Grammy for Best Orchestra Performance.
To hear SFS’s West Side Story achievement in its full glory, there are two choices. One is the disc itself, which was recorded in high-resolution 96/24 sound. The second is via high resolution download, which is available from DownloadsNOW.net (along with ten of the orchestra's Mahler series releases and the symphony’s newest effort, the marvelous Masterpieces in Miniature, which will likely receive a much deserved Grammy nomination in the Classical Orchestral category next year).