The Recording Academy announced that acclaimed conductor JoAnn Falletta received the prestigious 2021 GRAMMY® Award for Best Choral Performance as conductor of the world premiere Naxos recording, Richard Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshua (8.559885-86). Falletta shares the GRAMMY with Adam Luebke and James K. Bass, chorus masters of the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and UCLA Chamber Singers, respectively.
The highly acclaimed Yeshua recording also received nominations for composer Richard Danielpour for Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Bernd Gottinger for Best Engineered Album. Gottinger is the audio and video producer behind the BPO’s current virtual performance series, OnDemand.
Says JoAnn Falletta, “The Passion of Yeshua is an intensely personal telling of the final hours of Christ on earth, and in Richard Danielpour’s vision, the work beautifully incorporates the Jewish faith and the cadence of the Hebrew language into music of extraordinary beauty. Congratulations to all the performers – soloists, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and UCLA Chamber Singers, Adam Luebke and James Bass, chorus directors and most of all to Richard Danielpour for his stunning The Passion of Yeshua. I am so honored to have been part of this astonishing work. Richard’s gift for writing for voice, and for the astonishing colors of his orchestration, will make this work a classic for all time.”