Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2021: Meet the Winners

The Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2021 were held yesterday, with a total of 18 Awards given to recording artists and ensembles who have shown resilience and innovation throughout 2021.

Streamed online for the second time since their inception, the Awards were filmed at the VOCES8 Centre and opened with a Gershwin Prelude performed by classical pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason who hosted alongside James Jolly, Gramophone’s editor-in-chief.

Jolly commended this year’s winners, commenting that, ‘Despite everything we’ve been through since last year’s Awards, it’s a pleasure and an honour to pay tribute to such amazing musicians. We are genuinely blessed to live in an age of such talent and commitment, and to embrace artists from such different backgrounds and approaches’.

This year’s Special Achievement award went to the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which advocates for new and neglected music by American composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. The project was founded in 1996 by conductor Gil Rose who said in his acceptance speech: ‘we can’t know where to go unless we do the work to find out where we’ve been.’

James Ehnes was awarded 2021 Artist of the Year (sponsored by Raymond Weil), an accolade given, according to host James Jolly, to an artist ‘at the pinnacle of their powers… who [has] approached their craft in the spirit of positivity and a palpable desire to share their music with audiences.’

The 2021 Recording of the Year award went to Chandos’ recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes. Featuring a cast headed by Stuart Skelton and the late Erin Wall, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Choirs under the baton of Edward Gardner gave an ‘exciting, committed, necessary and brilliantly recorded’ performance.

Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for a remarkable career spanning more than four decades, Gundula Janowitz broadcast her thanks from Vienna, saying: ‘My ambition was always to serve music with the greatest commitment. My life with music has made me a happy person to this day. I thank you for it.’ Deutsche Grammophon, this year’s Gramophone Label of the Year, has marked this achievement with a new edition of Janowitz’s classic 1973 recording of Richard Strauss’s Four Last with Herbert von Karajan, remastered for Spatial Audio. You can listen to this here.

Soprano Fatma Said took home both the 2021 Gramophone Award for Song and the Young Artist award, sponsored by Classic FM. Following her double award acceptance, presented by Classic FM’s Alexander Armstrong, viewers were also treated to a clip of her debut performance at the Edinburgh International Festival earlier this year.

New this year was the Gramophone Spatial Audio Award, presented with Apple Music to Stile Antico for their Decca Classics album The Golden Renaissance. Spatial Audio employs Dolby Atmos technology to provide a fully immersive listening experience which, according to writer Peter Quantrill, in this album ‘serves to bring the particular movement of sound in space a step closer to the listener at home’.

The 2021 Concept Album award went to Christian-Pierre La Marca for the ‘multi-genre, multi-century, multi-texture’ album Cello 360, his first collaboration with the Naïve label, covering repertoire from the early 18^th century up to the present day.

The Awards’ only public vote was for the 2021 Orchestra of the Year award, also presented with Apple Music. This was won by the Minnesota Orchestra who took nearly a third of the 31,000 votes cast. Speaking from Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, music director Osmo Vänsä said ‘I would also like to acknowledge all the other outstanding orchestras from around the world who were nominated. This past year was not an easy one in the performing arts, and I congratulate you for all the good work you are doing to keep music going in your own community.’

Presented in association with Apple Music, E Gutzwiller et Cie, Banquiers and the charity Help Musicians, the Awards will be available to catch up on the Gramophone website for 90 days. 

You can listen to all the winners’ playlists on Apple Music here.