Six Primo clients receive GRAMMY® nominations

Primo Artists Clients Receive Six Nominations for the 66th annual GRAMMY® Awards
Best Opera Recording
David T. Little – Black Lodge

Best Classical Instrumental Solo
Curtis Stewart – of Love.
Seth Parker Woods – Difficult Grace

Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance
Catalyst Quartet – UNCOVERED Vol. 3
Third Coast Percussion – Between Breaths

Best Classical Solo Vocal Album
Christian Reif (with Julia Bullock) – Walking in the Dark

Additional Artists Featured on Nominated Recordings
Best Contemporary Classical Composition
Dark With Excessive Bright (Led by James Gaffigan)

Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance
American Stories (Featuring Valerie Coleman’s Shotgun Houses)

Producer of the Year, Classical
Elaine Martone, for Album Portfolio Including Difficult Grace (Seth Parker Woods), Between Breaths (Third Coast Percussion) and Ascenco (Santiago Cañón Valencia)
David Frost, for Album Portfolio Including Arc II (Orion Weiss)

Primo Artists is honored to announce that clients have received six nominations for the 66th Annual GRAMMY® Awards, to be held Sunday, February 4, 2024 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

Composer and PR client David T. Little’s Black Lodge has been nominated for Best Opera Recording. The multi-layered modern opera draws on the complex mythologies surrounding such artists as William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), David Lynch (Twin Peaks), and others. With a libretto by celebrated poet Anne Waldman and performances by Timur and the Dime Museum and Isaura String Quartet, Black Lodge was recorded remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth served as executive producer for the project, alongside co-producers Andrew McKenna Lee, Beth Morrison, and Little himself. The work was premiered by Beth Morrison Projects at Opera Philadelphia, with a soundtrack later released on Cantaloupe Music.

Conductor and Primo Artists client Christian Reif is nominated alongside his wife, soprano Julia Bullock, under Best Solo Vocal Album for Walking in the Dark. Making her solo recording debut on New Amsterdam Records, Bullock performs Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and an aria from John Adams’s El Niño by London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Reif. In addition, Reif performs as collaborative pianist for Bullock’s renditions of City Called Heaven (traditional spiritual), One By One (Connie Converse), Brown Baby (Oscar Brown Jr.), Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (Sandy Denny), and I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free (Dick Dalls / Billy Taylor).

PR clients cellist Seth Parker Woods’ Difficult Grace and violinist Curtis Stewart’s of Love are both nominated in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Difficult Grace, out on Cedille Records, is a semi-autobiographical exploration of Woods’ identity; past/present histories and personal growth that draws inspiration from the Great Migration; excerpts from the historic newspaper The Chicago Defender; immigration; and the poetry of Kemi Alabi and Dudley Randall. An evocative, theatrical, and genre-bending collaboration with choreographer/dancer Roderick George, Difficult Grace features Woods in the triple role of cellist, narrator/guide, and movement artist, performing music written for and with him by Freida Abtan, Monty Adkins, Fredrick Gifford, Ted Hearne, Nathalie Joachim and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay with visual artwork by Jacob Lawrence, Barbara Earl Thomas, Zoë McLean, and Freida Abtan.

Curtis Stewart’s self-composed and self-performed album of Love., out on New Amsterdam Records, is dedicated to his late mother, Elektra Kurtis-Stewart, and was recorded in the childhood apartment he inherited after his mother’s passing. His original compositions for strings, electronics and voice weave between a single poem of prayer and songs Curtis’s visionary mother taught him – meditative recompositions of Alice Coltrane, Johannes Brahms, Duke Ellington, Karol Szymanowski and Henry Purcell, along with selections from Greek folk music and jazz standards. Its 20 tracks chart a course of grieving and coming to grips with loss.

PR clients Third Coast Percussion’s Between Breaths and Catalyst Quartet’s Uncovered, Vol. 3: Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, William Grant Still & George Walker are both nominated for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.

Nominated in the same category is Anthony McGill & Pacifica Quartet’s American Stories, an album illuminating experiences that have shaped America through works by Richard Danielpour, James Lee III, Ben Shirley (all three world-premiere recordings), and Primo Artists client Valerie Coleman. Her featured work, Shotgun Houses, celebrates the life of Muhammad Ali and the West Louisville, Kentucky, neighborhood where she and the legendary prizefighter were raised.

This marks Third Coast Percussion’s (TCP) seventh GRAMMY® nomination. Their new album Between Breaths on Cedille Records is a musical exploration of meditation and rituals through five world premiere recordings: Missy Mazzoli’s Millennium Canticles, Tyondai Braxton's Sunny X, Ayanna Woods’ Triple Point, and Gemma Peacocke’s Death Wish; as well as TCP’s own collaborative piece, In Practice.

Catalyst Quartet’s Uncovered, Vol. 3: Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, William Grant Still & George Walker is the third issue of a multi-volume anthology highlighting string quartet works by historically important Black composers, which aims to bring greater awareness and programming of their music. The album, out on Azica Records, profiles three American composers who lived through the various Black artistic, political, and social projects that transformed the 20th century; and the deep contradictions that continue to plague the U.S. today.

In the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category, Missy Mazzoli received a nomination for her orchestral album, Dark with Excessive Bright. The album features world premiere recordings of four orchestral works performed by violinist Peter Herresthal, the Arctic Philharmonic and the Bergen Philharmonic, conducted by Tim Weiss and Primo Artists client James Gaffigan.

In addition, Elaine Martone is nominated under Producer of the Year, Classical for a portfolio of work including Primo PR client Santiago Cañón Valencia’s album Ascenso, a collection of world premiere recordings by Colombian composers, including his own original piece Ascenso Hacia lo Profundo. Martone’s nomination also cites her work as producer of Seth Parker Woods’ Difficult Grace and Third Coast Percussion’s Between Breaths.

In the same category, producer David Frost is nominated for a portfolio including pianist and Primo PR client Orion Weiss’s album Arc II, the second installment in an ongoing three-part series. In Arc II, Weiss brings together works by Ravel, Brahms and Shostakovich in a thematic exploration of each composer’s approach to grief and loss.

The 66th GRAMMY® Awards will be broadcast from Los Angeles on CBS and Paramount+ on Sunday, February 4, beginning at 8pm ET. Prior to the telecast, The GRAMMY® Awards Premiere Ceremony, at which many of the above categories will be announced, will stream live on grammy.com starting at 3:30pm ET. For more information, including a complete list of nominees, visit grammy.com.