We woke up this morning to a wonderful surprise! Visions and Variations has been nominated for TWO GRAMMY Awards, in the “Best Small Ensemble” and the “Best Engineered” category that highlights Jesse Lewis’s and Tom Caulfield’s outstanding work on the album.
Today has been a wonderful whirl of congratulations flying back and forth, musicians and groups going out of their way to recognize each other and wish each other well in the next stages. (Boston did beautifully in the nominations stage, and we’ll be heading to LA alongside members of the Boston Symphony and Boston Baroque in their respective categories.)
The feeling of instant validation is - let’s face it - hard to beat. It’s especially meaningful in this case because Visions and Variations is a stand-alone project; dreamed up by the Criers as an album that would really feature the orchestra as itself. 100 percent A Far Cry playing, frankly, some of the hardest music we’ve ever attempted. 45 different variations on this album. Perfectly wrought miniatures that we had to turn on a dime and execute, one after the other.
We were sweating blood by day three! There were snowstorms swirling and and stomach bugs flying as we shuttled to and from Worcester’s beautiful Mechanics Hall. We just kept going. Show up, drink some tea, rustle up some chocolate, warm up the fingers, make a plan, break’s over, time to tackle Variation 7. Alex made a habit of making up little poems to remind us to put our phones in Airplane Mode. Then Jesse’s voice would crackle over the speaker and we’d be on.
Funding was all accomplished through a Kickstarter project and we are so so SO grateful to everyone who stepped up in that process and became “a part” of the album. Without you, this project would never have come to pass. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
It’s the beginning of an adventure; now let’s see what happens at the awards in February!
