LITTLE ROCK — Soprano Laura Inman didn’t exactly win a Grammy Award on Feb. 10. But a choir she sang with did.
The Kansas City Chorale’s June 2012 album Life & Breath - Choral Works by Rene Clausen, on the Chandos label, actually took both awards for which it was nominated: Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album, Classical.
You didn’t see the Recording Academy hand out the classical honors on the big prime-time TV broadcast from Los Angeles that night - the academy announces those, along with a lot of so-called “genre” category awards, during the afternoon. But Inman, a 1995 graduate of Cabot High, did get to join 20 singers from the choir and conductor Charles Bruffy at the ceremony.
“It’s a couple of hours before [the telecast] where they announce all of the other awards,” Inman says. “They save the pop music stuff for that night.”
The session began about 1:30 p.m. Los Angeles time; “I think we knew by 3 o’clock” that their album had won.
Inman is not actually a member of the Kansas City Chorale; she has been singing with the Phoenix Chorale, which Bruffy also conducts. She and three other Phoenix singers joined the 24 members of the Kansas City ensemble for the recording.
“I was just a ringer,” she admits. “I was in Phoenix for 11 years. Charles is [conductor of] both, and we’ve done some joint concerts. I had a little bit of a solo on one of the tracks, a six-second solo in ‘O Vos Omnes,’ the second-to-last track.”
Clausen is beloved of chorus conductors and his works are performed often, but Inman says she was only familiar with some of the pieces on the album before she showed up to record them.
“There were a couple of pieces that I had sung in college, including ‘A New Creation: Set Me as a Seal,’ and the Mass for Double Choir he actually wrote for the Kansas City Chorale. We had sung a little of that in Phoenix.
“But about half of it I didn’t know, and didn’t actually know until the week before,” she says. “We kind of flew off and went straight to the recording session, just like a studio musician would do.” It wasn’t quite sight-reading, she says, but it wasn’t much different: “But once you’ve done this for a while, you know what your voice can do, you just get up there and do it.”
This wasn’t Inman’s first go-round with the Grammys. Spotless Rose, a Phoenix Chorale album she sang on, was a Best Small Ensemble winner in 2008; in 2007, a joint album by both chorales, Grechaninov: Passion Week, received a Grammy as Best Engineered, Classical. Albums by both chorales received nominations in 2009.
Needless to say, the singers don’t come home with gramophone statuettes. “Our conductor gets one, and the chorale gets one,” Inman says. The Kansas City trophy case is “probably our conductor’s piano.”
“In Phoenix, we keep ours in our office, and anytime we have a concert, we put it out in the lobby, where people are buying tickets.”
She is also a member of Ireland’s national choir, Anuna, directed by Michael McGlynn - “12 members, mainly a cappella, they’re the original Riverdance choir” - and in the spring she’ll be joining the Manhattan Concert Chorale, a new New York City professional group.
Inman spent a year at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia before moving to the University of Louisville, where she studied voice and music education; she has a master’s degree and a doctorate in conducting from Arizona State University. She recently moved to Atlanta and teaches choral music at Georgia Institute of Technology.
“I only teach a couple of hours a day, so yes, I teach during the week and do my research and articles - scholarly activity is what they call it - and then I sing on weekends,” she says.
Style, Pages 31 on 02/26/2013