GRAMMYS COME HOME: North Texas was well-represented at Sunday night’s 51st Grammy Awards. Leading the pack was Fort Worth-raised producer T. Bone Burnett. He’s the man behind the Alison Krauss-Robert Plant collaboration Raising Sand, which took home five awards including album of the year. (Incidentally, that’s five more awards that Plant ever took home with Led Zeppelin.) Wearing his trademark dark shades, he also proved a more-than-capable sideman as he played guitar while the pair took the stage as the last performers before album of the year was announced (a pretty good indication that they were going to win). Also bringing home a gramophone was another Fort Worth native son, Kirk Franklin, whose The Fight of My Life won for Contemporary R&B Gospel Album. University of North Texas student Duane Hargis also snagged a Grammy as part of Ruben Ramos and The Mexican Revolution. Hargis plays trumpet as part of the Revolution as well as UNT’s 4 O’Clock Lab Band. The Revolution’s Viva La Revolucion took home the award for top Tejano album. For a complete list of Grammy winners, click here.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN: Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra Music Director Miguel Harth-Bedoya was also nominated in the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (with Orchestra) category for conducting Wu Man and the Chicago Symphony’s Traditions And Transformations: Sounds Of Silk Road Chicago album. Alas, he didn’t win (though the album was named the best engineered classical album, if that’s any consolation). Harth-Bedoy’s had headier things on his mind these days, though, notably his debut with the English National Opera conducting La boheme. The debut got pushed back because of the massive snow storms in London, but the reviews are finally in. And it appears the Brits are having a tough time coming to a consensus.

Richard Morrison gives probably the most scathing. Writing in the Times of London, he says:

“The conductor, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, has also been flown across the pond. You have to ask why. His treatment of the love duets is so hearse-paced and rigid that there seems a danger of the music stalling like an old banger. And the orchestra, though sumptuous, is often too loud. Oh well. Perhaps it will snow again, and ENO can cancel more performances”

Ouch.

But Barry Millington of the Evening Standard would beg to differ. He writes that the performance was “strong on psychological detail,” and that Harth-Bedoya, “draws a superb account of the score from the ENO orchestra: passionate yet supple, evoking the crackle of fire in the garret one minute and the stirrings of love the next.”

You can judge for yourself by logging on to classicaltv.com to watch the opera.