True Concord Voices & Orchestra landed its second Grammy nomination on Friday for “A Dream So Bright: Choral Music of Jake Runestad,” released in August.
The Tucson ensemble is up for the 2025 Best Choral Performance Grammy for the album, which featured pianist Jeffrey Biegel. True Concord founder and music director Eric Holtan conducted the performance.
Get a sneak peek at a recording session of “Dreams of the Fallen” and “Earth Symphony” with True Concord Voices & Orchestra.
The nod follows True Concord’s 2015 Best Choral Performance nomination for “Far in the Heavens: Choral Music of Stephen Paulus.” The ensemble, now in its 21st season, lost, but Paulus won a Best Contemporary Classical Composition Grammy for the album’s centerpiece “Prayers & Remembrances,” commissioned by True Concord in 2011 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
Paulus, who died in 2014, was awarded posthumously.
True Concord is the only classical music ensemble from Tucson to ever get a Grammy nomination.
“We’re thrilled with this one,” Holtan said Friday. “I definitely thought it was worthy of consideration. Jake is one of America’s rising stars as a composer and he wrote two incredible pieces of music on two critically important topics.”
The album, on Reference Recordings, garnered critical acclaim, with Fanfare saying it had “exceptionally fine music that has something original and important to say.”
Gramophone said the album makes “a forceful social statement … that comes through with bold and sensitive resolve” while Remy Franck’s Luxembourg-based online classical music blog Pizzicato called it “evocative, effective and musically brilliant, and truly exciting in this magnificent performance.”
“A Dream So Bright” is anchored by the True Concord-commission “Earth Symphony,” which explores the human cost of climate change. It opens with Runestad’s “Dreams of the Fallen,” commissioned by Biegel with text by American veteran-turned-poet Brian Turner that explores the harsh realism of battle.
“I think the themes of the music probably resonated with members of the (Recording) Academy,” Holtan said of the organization that presents the Grammys. “Certainly the beauty and compelling nature of Jake’s writing and the poetry; the libretto that we commissioned of Todd Boss for ‘Earth Symphony,’ to me, is itself worthy of recognition.”
True Concord Voices & Orchestra recorded “A Dream So Bright” in Phoenix in May 2023. The album was nominated Friday for a Grammy.
True Concord recorded the album in May 2023 at Paradise Valley’s Camelback Bible Church with producer Peter Rutenberg, who also produced “Far In the Heavens.”
Holtan said the Grammy nomination “is a very strong affirmation of the artistic quality of our organization,” adding that he wished Runestad had been nominated for “Earth Symphony” or “Dreams of the Fallen.” “Earth Symphony” did win an Emmy Award in 2022 and “Dreams” took home the prestigious Morton Gould Young Composer Award from the ASCAP Foundation in 2013.
True Concord finished its next recording “Hear I Am: Music of Jocelyn Hagen” in May; it is expected to be released next year.
The Grammys will be awarded Feb. 2, 2025, in Los Angeles.
