From Anne Midgette’s article The Grammy nobody knowson 12/7/10:
In the wake of the announcements of the Grammy nominations last week, two Los Angeles Times bloggers ran a post observing that “the Recording Academy is so much more eager to reward commercial hits than the motion picture academy.” The statement can be debated, but one thing is certain: the authors weren’t looking at this year’s classical music nominations when they wrote it.
We’ve heard a lot about how the record industry isn’t dying because there are so many new recordings – more than anybody can listen to. This year’s Grammy nominations in classical music appear to show the results of this embarrassment of riches: a sampling of recordings so wide-ranging as to appear nearly random. It’s often said that the Grammy voters go for names they recognize, but the nominations this year may curb that tendency by not offering much name recognition at all. Works by the composers Steven Mackey and Michael Daugherty were both nominated for Best Classical Album; the five nominated operas were not by Verdi or Wagner but by Berg, Hasse, Saariaho, Shchedrin, and Sir Arthur Sullivan; and Mitsuko Uchida was the lone big name in a category – Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (with Orchestra) – that included a mandolin concerto by Avner Dorman played by Avi Avital, Eliesha Nelson playing a viola concerto by Quincy Porter, and Joseph Banowetz performing a piano concerto by Paul Kletzki. No MTT (or a Hilary Hahn) in sight.