“Here is the world, and you live in it.” Joyce DiDonato, Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara sang this lyric in dramatically striated layers, their timbres gradually finding confluence as a single radiating waveform. “And you try to be. And you try.”
This exquisite musical moment arrived during the pre-broadcast Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony, as the three divas — two sopranos and a mezzo, with eight Grammys between them — performed “All Along,” from Act II of The Hours. The opera’s composer, Kevin Puts, accompanied them at the piano, spinning a stately chordal carousel.
Puts, who won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2023, didn’t end up with another for The Hours. The award for Best Opera Recording went instead to Saariaho: Adriana Mater — the first recording of Kaija Saariaho’s second opera, with Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Accepting the award, mezzo soprano Fleur Barron, who is featured on the recording, noted that it was made just days after Saariaho died of cancer. “This opera explores issues most of us are processing: war, cycles of violence,” she said.
Gabriela Ortiz, this year’s most garlanded artist in the classical field — her Revolución Diamantina won Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Best Classical Compendium, as well as Best Orchestral Performance for Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic — struck a similar note in one of her acceptance speeches. “This award is dedicated to all the brave women in Mexico and around the world who fight against injustice every day,” she said, alluding to the real-life injustice, and activist response, that inspired her dynamic ballet score.

The Grammy for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album went to Beyond The Years — Unpublished Songs Of Florence Price, which features 19 unpublished songs by the African-American composer, all but three of them world-premiere recordings. “When I started my career in 2024 as an opera soprano,” said Karen Slack as she accepted the award with pianist Michelle Cann, “I never imagined standing here on this stage today.” (Slack, visibly nervous at the podium, misspoke about that timing: she has been an acclaimed operatic soprano for more than 20 years, having graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2002.)
“Back then this award only went to very famous superstar singers on major classical labels,” Slack went on. “But today I get the opportunity to be here among the greats that have come here before me to represent the inimitable American composer Florence Price, a trailblazing Black woman who wrote extraordinary music at a time when it was believed that only European and male composers belong in the concert hall.”
Cann, the Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, wasn’t the only Philadelphia-based artist to win an award. Donald Nally and The Crossing won their fourth award in the Best Choral Performance category — for Ochre, which features music by Ayanna Woods, George Lewis and Caroline Shaw.
Shaw also came home a winner this year: Rectangles and Circumstance, her album with Sō Percussion, took Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance. As for Best Classical Instrumental Solo, the award went to pianist Víkingur Ólafsson for his recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
In the technical categories, Elaine Martone won Producer Of The Year, Classical, for a recent body of work that includes four albums with conductor Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra. And the award for Best Engineered Album, Classical went to Mark Donahue and John Newton, for Bruckner: Symphony No. 7, by Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin had his hand in another winning album this year, though perhaps not in an anticipated category: he was a producer on Maestro: Music by Leonard Bernstein, which won Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media. In his speech, Steven Gizicki, the film’s music supervisor, called out the London Symphony Orchestra: “We spent almost a week at Ely Cathedral listening to the LSO and choir playing Mahler for days and days, and it was really just an honor to be around that.”
Also in the cinematic realm, Hans Zimmer won Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media for Dune: Part 2, while Winifred Phillips won Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Pianist Jon Batiste and director-producer Matthew Heineman won Best Music Film for American Symphony, a documentary about Batiste and his wife, Suleika Jaouad, during her battle with leukemia. Batiste and Dan Wilson also shared Best Song Written for Visual Media, for “It Never Went Away.”

Béla Fleck, who headed into these Grammy Awards with four nominations, came home with one: Best Jazz Instrumental Album, for Remembrance, his collaboration with the late pianist Chick Corea. His centennial nod to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue — “Rhapsody in Blue(Grass)” — didn’t win in either of the categories for which it was nominated. But it did provide another inarguable highlight of the Premiere Ceremony, as Fleck performed a solo banjo arrangement of the theme, a feat of translation and sheer mastery. Whether it scanned as classical music, bluegrass, folk or something else altogether, it was a tribute with enough panache to honor its subject — and a reminder that the canon will always keep inspiring steep new challenges.