2022

Four Elements: Immersive Symphony

With Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra · Simón Bolívar National Choir

2023 Latin Grammy — Best Classical Album

This is the record. The one that turned three decades of work into a Latin Grammy, and the one that explains why Huáscar Barradas is called «the flute of Venezuela» outside Venezuela.

Four Elements is an immersive symphony for orchestra and chorus built on the four elements — fire, air, water and earth. Four movements, none of them short: between seven and eleven minutes each. It is not a flute record with symphonic backing, which is what the artist’s name might lead you to expect; it is an orchestral work in which the flute enters and leaves the texture as one voice among many, sometimes soloist and sometimes part of the forest.

He recorded it with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the Simón Bolívar National Choir, conducted by Ollantay Velásquez. That is the orchestra of El Sistema — the same institution Barradas helped found in its Zulia chapter, forty years after starting there as a student.

The award

On 16 November 2023, at the 24th Annual Latin Grammy Awards — held in Seville, the first time the ceremony left the United States — Huáscar Barradas Four Elements Immersive Symphony For Orchestra And Chorus won the Latin Grammy for Best Classical Album.

It was Huáscar Barradas’s first Latin Grammy, and also the first for the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the National Choir. He had been nominated twice before: in 2011, for Best Long Form Music Video with the DVD Entre Amigos 2, and in 2013, for Best Instrumental Album with Dos Mundos 2.

A detail the press often gets wrong

On streaming platforms this album is credited to the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the National Choir, not to Huáscar Barradas as lead artist. That is correct: it is a symphonic work, and the orchestra is what performs it. Barradas is the composer and the soloist.

And it is a Latin Grammy, awarded by the Latin Recording Academy — not the United States Grammy, awarded by the Recording Academy. They are two different awards from two different organisations.