BY KAREN BOSSICK
Time for Three, Kevin Puts and Edwin Outwater are toasting Grammy wins following the 65th Grammy Awards on Sunday night.
- Kevin Puts won Best Classical Contemporary Composition for “Contact,” a piece co-commissioned by the Sun Valley Music Festival and performed with Time for Three during last year’s Summer Season. Puts is no stranger to the Sun Valley Music Festival, having written “Hymn to the Sun” for the opening concert of the Sun Valley Pavilion.
His other-worldly “Contact” was based on the idea of making contact with alien civilizations millions of light years away from the Earth. It included Time for Three singing a cappella harmony, a signal beamed into space by a lone flute, bluegrass fiddling and singing and a spooky third movement meant to evoke an abandoned vessel floating in space
- Time for Three, which talked about their Grammy nomination while performing at The Argyros a couple weeks ago, won a Grammy for Best Classical Instrument Solo for their recording of “Contact” with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The trio, made up of double bass player Ranaan Meyer and violinists Chares Yang and Nick Kendall, enjoyed a three-year residency with the Sun Valley Music Festival and has returned to Sun Valley since to perform with the orchestra and at The Argyros.
- Edwin Outwater and the Chicago Symphony won Best Classical Engineered Recording for their recording of Mason Bates’ “Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra.” Outwater’s parents Edwin Outwater III and Tish Outwater have long had a home in Sun Valley.
The younger Outwater curated the Festival’s Winter Season in 2020, surprising the audience with “Bon Appetit!” a comic culinary one-woman opera based on Julia Child before pretending to welcome the audience into his home for a winter soiree that included classical pieces suited for the salon, music room and kitchen.
Mason Bates, by the way, will make his third appearance as DJ Masonic, presiding over the Sun Valley Music Festival’s Lawn Party following the Pops Concert on Aug. 14. The Music Festival orchestra will play Bates’ piece “Soundcheck in C Major” during the summer season.
SUN VALLEY MUSIC FESTIVAL NOMINEES
Pianist Danill Trifonov, who performed Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Festival orchestra last summer, was nominated for Best Classical Instrumental Solo at the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Nicholas Phan, who sang at this past summer’s Gala performance of “Carmina Burana,” was nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.
Sasha Cooke was nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, as well. She will return to Sun Valley this summer to sing Mahler’s “Ruckert Lieder” on Aug. 10.