Nominations for the 53rd Annual GRAMMY Awards® were announced on 1st December 2010 by The Recording Academy®. Plaudits are due for a large number of classical musicians including Øyvind Gimse, Geir Inge Lotsberg, the Fred Sherry String Quartet and Nelson Freire.
Veteran Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has been nominated for his Symphony No.4 under the Best Classical Contemporary Composition category. The Estonian composer was born near Tallinn in 1935 and is famed for his avant-garde experimentation.
After learning music at the Tallinn Conservatory, 1976 saw Pärt introduced a technique called “tintinnabuli” (from the Latin, little bells):
“I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements —with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials —with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation.”
Arvo Pärt is now 75 years old and his birthday was celebrated with the Arvo Pärt Festival 2010 held across several Estonian towns.
Symphony No. 4 is named “Los Angeles” and is dedicated to Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It is Pärt’s first symphony written in over 37 years and was premiered in LA on 10th January 2009. It remains to be seen whether the GRAMMY jury will favour his music above that of Michael Daugherty, Hans Werner Henze, Magnus Lindberg and Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin.
The 53rd Annual GRAMMY Awards will be held on February 13th 2011 at the STAPLES Center in Los Angeles and will be broadcast live in high definition TV and 5.1 surround sound on CBS from 8 – 11:30 p.m. (ET/PT).