Houston Grand Opera has won a Grammy Award for the Best Opera Recording, it was announced Sunday night. The winner, Intelligence, was the first Grammy nomination for HGO in more than 35 years and the third Grammy HGO has ever won.
Composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer created it in collaboration with director and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar after receiving a commission from HGO. It premiered in October 2023 and was latter made into the winning recording.
The opera told the story of two women who became spies for the Union during the Civil War Southerner Elizabeth Van Lew (mezzo Jamie Barton) is a Northern sympathizer. She persuades her household slave Mary Jane (soprano Janai Brugger). to go to work in the house of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and pass on what she finds out from there.
This is the first opera HGO has recorded under its new HGO label that was created with London Symphony Orchestra’s LSO Live label. Kwamé Ryan conducted the orchestra.
According to a press release from HGO: In 1978, the company won a Grammy in the Best Opera Recording category for the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, and in 1989, it won Best Contemporary Composition for the company-commissioned world premiere Nixon in China, composed by John Adams with a libretto by Alice Goodman. The company was also nominated for Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha in 1977.
HGO General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor released this statement: “This Grammy win is an affirmation of what Houston Grand Opera stands for—bold creativity, artistic excellence, and the power of American opera.”