PERFORMING ARTS : Round Up the Unusual Suspects : The Grammy Awards look to new performers and offbeat repertory. Barber, Bartok and Boulez seem in favor.

The classical Grammy winners had comfortingly familiar names throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, when Georg Solti was music director of the Chicago Symphony and their recordings couldn’t lose. Itzhak Perlman’s beaming countenance was everywhere, and Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan (never a big winner, but always a contender) and Vladimir Horowitz trod the earth.

Solti is still with us, aged, no longer in Chicago and an infrequent recording presence. Bernstein, Karajan and Horowitz are gone. Perlman has not only scaled back his activities but decreased the wattage of his smile. Kathleen Battle continued her winning Grammy ways last year, but her subsequent badder-than-ever bad-girl antics have placed her in recording limbo.

There is no dominant conductor these days. The big-ticket maestros--Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Bernard Haitink, in particular--have, inexplicably, not been beloved by Grammy, and none even figures among the finalists this year. In their stead, we have representatives of a younger generation: Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle and, tangentially, Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Who is the world’s most popular conductor today? Ask the voting members of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, the body that awards the Grammys, and you’ll get an answer unlikely from any other source: that stern-visaged taskmaster Pierre Boulez, who is getting awesome Grammy mileage out of his occasional association with the Chicago Symphony.

Who are our favorite composers? Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Puccini or any of the others who pack the house? No, stupid, Bela Bartok and Samuel Barber. And how to explain the absence of a single Baroque composer from the lists?

So let’s to the prognostications, beginning with the best classical album category, where apples compete with oranges, legumes and poultry, and where last year’s winner, Bartok by Boulez in Chicago, is a possibility to repeat, this time with the dour Hungarian’s popular Concerto for Orchestra.

The competition is a release loaded with recent Grammy winners, Thomas Hampson, John Browning and the Emerson Quartet and a certain future winner, Cheryl Studer, but music you’re unlikely to encounter in a lifetime of concert-going: Songs of Samuel Barber.

Violinist Gil Shaham, a finalist last year but not ready then to cop a big one, has since been the subject of sufficient publicity to make his current entry, in which he is backed by Andre Previn and the London Symphony, an outside possibility: the Concerto by sudden-favorite Barber paired with the pretty bauble of a concerto by Korngold.

A set of the Debussy Preludes, magnificently played as they are by pianist Krystian Zimerman (about whom more later), and a Mahler Second Symphony from Herbert Blomstedt and the San Francisco Symphony, trail the pack.

The Bartok-Boulez release returns as a best orchestral entry, duking it out for primacy--successfully--with one of this year’s few standard repertory entries, the nine Beethoven Symphonies, but with a twist: they are freshly dressed by John Eliot Gardiner and his period-instrument Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique (ditch the moniker, guys!).

Then, too, there’s a deliciously daunting CD of Ives’ crankiest hits from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and still less likely-to-win modernism in the form of late-Messiaen from Myung-Whun Chung and the Bastille Opera Orchestra, and early Copland conducted by Oliver Knussen.

The best opera recording category is unprecedentedly rich in unhackneyed marvels this year: a joined pair of one-acters, “Arlecchino” and “Turandot” by the enigmatic Italian with German sympathies, Ferruccio Busoni, presented by Lyon Opera forces under Kent Nagano; the endearingly tacky American verismo of Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah,” sung by the starry trio of Cheryl Studer, Jerry Hadley and Samuel Ramey, again from Lyon and Nagano; Rossini’s spectacularly inventive “Semiramide,” with Studer in the title role and Jennifer Larmore, on the fast track to stardom, as her accomplice, and Shostakovich’s rude-crude-sexy “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” with Maria Ewing an incendiary presence in the title role and Chung stirring up the mucky depravity in the Bastille Opera pit.

The one familiar work among the finalists is Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger,” its place secured by the shining presence of Ben Heppner, rapidly becoming the world’s Wagnerian tenor of choice, and--yet again--the versatile Studer.

In this most difficult year for handicapping the Grammys, what with all the new performers and offbeat repertory, I’ll withhold a prediction, but not my heart: that belongs to “Semiramide.”

A mong the choral music re cordings, again on a list devoid of the usual fare, the palm belongs to John Eliot Gardiner, his superb Monteverdi Choir and Romantic Revolutionaries for the recording debut of Berlioz’s until recently lost “Messe Solennelle.” Chief competitors are the seraphic Rachmaninoff “Vespers,” sung by the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir, and the densely perfumed “Stabat Mater” of Karol Szymanowski from Simon Rattle and City of Birmingham forces.

Grammy’s nod to fashionable Spiritual Minimalism, the “Te Deum” of Arvo Part, is also among the chosen, done to a precious turn by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.

Among the prize-worthy instrumentalist soloists with Orchestra are yet another Chung entry, violinist Kyung-Wha (Myung-Whun’s sister) and the Second Concerto of the inescapable Bartok, with Simon Rattle and his Birminghamers, which has to withstand the graceful challenge of Shaham’s aforementioned Barber-Korngold pairing and the juggernaut drive of this year’s likely champ, “The New York Album”--no, not Yo-Yo Ma joining Bobby Short for some chic Cole Porter duets, but the redoubtable cellist in sterner stuff by the late Stephen Albert, Bloch and, yes, Bartok.

There are classy--but unlikely to be around at the finish--contributions, too, from pianist Yefim Bronfman (Prokofiev Second Concerto) and Emanuel Ax in piano concertos by Liszt and Schoenberg, with Salonen conducting London’s Philharmonia.

The solo instrumental lineup offers the “New Horowitz,” as his handlers humbly describe the baby-faced Russian Evgeny Kissin, punishing Chopin and probably getting a prize for his wanton act, and those glorious Debussy Preludes from Zimerman; a strong Haydn recital from Ax; Americana from pianist Alan Feinberg, and one string entry, violinist Viktoria Mullova playing Bach.

The chamber music category is notable for a Grammy first, a super-budget entry (on Naxos, although nominations are not identified by label): a tough-nut program of, hi there!, Bartok, delivered with walloping intensity by an Hungarian trio comprising violinist Gyorgy Pauk, pianist Jeno Jando and clarinetist Kalman Berkes.

It’s a beauty, but so is the Dvorak coupling from the solidly entrenched Emerson Quartet with pianist Menahem Pressler, a predictable victor over the once-invincible Juilliard Quartet and its French program and a blah Mozart-Beethoven item from pianist Daniel Barenboim with winds from the Chicago Symphony and Berlin Phil. There’s another dark-horse entry as well, two Beethoven sonatas, ecstatically played by cellist Mischa Maisky and pianist Martha Argerich.

Best classical vocal likewise has its surprises: the ageless Peter Schreier in an elegant Mendelssohn collection and Anne Sophie Otter with “Love’s Twilight,” dreamy flights of erotic fancy by Berg, Korngold and Richard Strauss.

Then there’s a debut recital by the much-touted Welshman Bryn Terfel, unable to scale his sturdy baritone down to the more intimate requirements of his Schubert program, and a strong set of Russsian songs from the Siberian heart-throb, Dmitri Hvorostovsky.

Still, this is likely to be the exquisite Cecilia Bartoli’s year--to compensate for past slights from NARAS--for “The Impatient Lover,” Italian songs by non-Italian composers (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert).

And what, you ask, of “The 3 Tenors in Concert 1994,” with its cheering Dodger Stadium hordes? The recording that would surely cream the competition? Well, it got its comeuppance for not being classical enough, i.e., the presence of “Moon River,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Those Were the Days,” etc., created a program less than 75% classical and was therefore banned from contention here by the academy rule book.

“Tenors” winds up instead contending for pop album of the year. Imagine: Pavarotti, Domingo, Carreras, Massenet, Leoncavallo, Puccini and Verdi pitted against Tony Bennett ( real class), Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt and somebody--or bodies--called Seal. Boggle.

In closing, one non-performance category should be noted: best contemporary composition, where a Grammy is awarded to a previously unrecorded work written during the past 25 years. In hot contention is the Fourth Symphony of the late Witold Lutoslawski, written for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. How nice for once to be able to root for the home team at Grammy time.