For the second straight year, Chicago's Cedille Records, the city's only classical record label, has earned a Grammy Award nomination. The Edgewater-based label's disc of exhilarating orchestral music by 20th-century American composer Robert Kurka (1921-1957), a Cicero native, is one of five recordings vying for the 2005 Grammy Award in the category "best engineered album, classical."
Performing on the CD is the Grant Park Orchestra, conducted by Carlos Kalmar (Cedille CDR 90000 077). Nominees were announced Dec. 7. The 47th Grammy Awards will be presented this Sunday, Feb. 13.
If Cedille's CD gets the nod, the award will go to co-engineers Bill Maylone and Christopher Willis. Maylone, the label's chief engineer and longtime technical guru, handled post-production tasks of editing and audio mixing. Willis, a freelance engineer best-known for his work on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lyric Opera of Chicago broadcasts over WFMT, selected and set up the microphones for the session and handled control-room duties.
Among this year's classical Grammy contenders, the Kurka CD is the only one with Chicago artists or production personnel.
The Grammy announcement is a replay of sorts for Cedille. Last year, its CD of Romantic-era violin concertos by Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim, featuring violinist Rachel Barton Pine, was nominated for the very same award for sound quality. It was engineered by the same team of Maylone and Willis in the same location, Chicago's Orchestra Hall, also with maestro Kalmar—conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on that occasion. Cedille founder and president James Ginsburg produced both Grammy-nominated CDs.
The Kurka CD won a Classical Internet Award from the editors of the ClassicsToday.com Web site. "It's fabulous. . . . I have no hesitation in acclaiming this disc as one of the most important and rewarding releases of 2004," wrote critic David Hurwitz in his review of the CD. Comparing the CD to a Kurka release on another label, Hurwitz commended Cedille's recording for projecting a "warmer perspective, with richer bass and more presence given the string and woodwinds while certainly not stinting on the brass and percussion."
The Cedille (pronounced say-DEE) label, an arm of the nonprofit Chicago Classical Recording Foundation, focuses on world-class performing artists and composers in and from Chicago. From the outset, Cedille earned praise from critics and the public for its audiophile-quality sound.
Celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2004, Cedille has a catalog of 80 CD titles, commercially distributed throughout the U.S. and overseas.
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