Anne Akiko Meyers MIRROR IN MIRROR

Superstar violinist Anne Akiko Meyers is one of today’s most in-demand classical performers. A Billboard Top Selling Classical Instrumentalist of the Year, she is beloved by audiences around the world, with a reputation for groundbreaking recital programmes and ground-breaking commissions. Mirror in Mirror marks her 37th studio album and is one of her most personal projects to date.

With the exception of Ravel, Anne collaborated with all of the composers and arrangers on this album. Several of the works were written for her. The music is reflective and spiritual, and weaves a beautiful story. Philip Glass’ Metamorphosis II is heard in an arrangement commissioned by Anne. The original work inspired Fratres by Arvo Pärt, whose Spiegel im Speigel (Mirror in Mirror) provides the album’s title. John Corigliano’s Lullaby for Natalie was written to commemorate the birth of Anne’s first daughter. Anne has commissioned numerous works by Jakob Ciupinski who combines acoustic instruments with electronics in Edo Lullaby – a modern setting of a traditional Japanese melody that Anne recalls from her childhood – and Wreck of the Umbria which conjures the composer’s dive and discovery of the ship off the coast of Sudan. Ciupinski contributes electronics to Ravel’s Tzigane, re-creating the sound of the original version’s lutheal. The album is capped by another Anne commission – the premiere recording of Morten Lauridsen’s own arrangement for violin and orchestra of his most famous choral composition, O Magnum Mysterium.

Anne Akiko Meyers FANTASIA

Last December I travelled to Finland to play Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra, written by the great composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara, which I will be premiering with Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony this upcoming season. Sadly with Rautavaara’s recent death, this will be a posthumous world premiere. 

Rautavaara was a legendary Finnish composer who wrote eight symphonies, 14 concertos, and numerous other works for chamber ensembles and choir. He was a protégé of Sibelius, active until age 87, and was best known for writing Symphony No 7, Angel of Light and the beautifully haunting work, Cantus Arcticus: concerto for birds and orchestra, a piece that took my breath away the first time I heard it.

In my early twenties, I regularly went to record and sheet-music stores, looking through items one at a time in the hope of discovering music that would make the hairs on my neck stand up. It was then I first discovered Rautavaara’s music, and for years, dreamed of commissioning him to compose more music for violin. In 2014, I inquired if Rautavaara, with the wonderful support of Boosey & Hawkes, would be interested in writing a fantasy for violin and orchestra. I was beyond elated when he responded that indeed he would and worked quickly. I received a handwritten draft of the score in the fall of last year, and breathlessly ran to my music studio to play through it. 

I think there are similar qualities to the Angel of Light and Cantus Arcticus and Rautavaara’s signature soulful sound permeates throughout the piece, with fluid harmonies and deep moods  -much like flowing large movements of water and majestic scenes from nature. 

In December, I flew to Helsinki to meet Rautavaara and perform the work for him. We met at the apartment he shared with his wife, and the apartment was flooded with a special light that only seems to exist at the edge of the earth, overlooking the sea. He stood with a walker and was incredibly  gentle and kind. Smiling and laughing, we spoke about how Sibelius liked the fact that Rautavaara owned an automobile, as well as his time in New York, studying at the Juilliard School where I also went to school. 

After I played Fantasia, he looked at me and repeatedly said, 'I wrote such beautiful music!' We all laughed and agreed. He apologized for what he felt were his lazy bow markings and was so happy that I took the liberty to change the bowings to punctuate the phrasing the way I thought would bring his poetry out best. I was amazed that he made no changes to any notes or dynamics. Everything was in place just the way he wrote it. 

Fantasia is transcendent and has the feeling of an elegy with a very personal reflective mood. Rautavaara’s music will live on forever and I thank him from the bottom of my heart for writing a masterpiece that makes me cry every time I listen to it. (Anne Akiko Meyers / Gramophone)

Anne Akiko Meyers / André-Michel Schub THE AMERICAN ALBUM

RCA Victor's The American Album is the most daring and ambitious program undertaken by violinist Anne Akiko Meyers for RCA Victor and features some of the most challenging and invigorating music to be found among her early playing. The showpiece here is Meyers' rendering of Charles Ives' Sonata No. 4 "Children's Day at the Camp Meeting," in which she transits seamlessly from the elementary, student-like playing at the opening through the fierce transcendentalism in the middle section to the whimsical, scherzo-like final movement. Meyers' playing matches Ives' rub-your-head-while-you-pat-your-tummy requirements without losing her sense of line or even tonal beauty. Both of these elements are very much in play in Aaron Copland's Nocturne, an early piece combined in a set of two along with Copland's quaint Ukulele Lullaby, but held out separately here; Meyers exercises supreme poise and control over the whole movement. Her reading of Copland's Sonata for violin and piano likewise emphasizes continuity and tonal beauty, but when she needs to throw off fireworks, such as in the Allegro section of the first movement, you can practically see them sparkle. Walter Piston's neo-classic Sonatina for violin & piano -- intended for, but interchangeable with a harpsichord accompaniment -- is equal parts rugged Americana and puff pastry, and Meyers interlocks with accompanist André-Michel Schub and pulls it off with aplomb. Blues, composed by respected Indiana University professor and jazz musician David Baker, provides Meyers a chance to show off some soulfulness in material in more of a let-your-hair-down mode than the more serious and rigorous fare found elsewhere on the disc. 

The packaging of this CD should not deter the listener from enjoying what was an extraordinarily brave program for a young, major-label artist want to say something about American music minus all the flag waving and bombast. Folks, never mind the cover; it's what's inside Anne Akiko Meyers' The American Album that counts. (Dave Lewis)

Anne Akiko Meyers SERENADE The Love Album

Serenade: The Love Album was recorded on the celebrated 'Ex-Vieuxtemps' Guarneri del Gesu violin, dated 1741, which is considered to be the finest sounding violins in existence, and is known to be most valuable violin in the world, having last sold for over $16 million. Anne Akiko Meyers has been awarded exclusive lifetime use of this instrument. This year, she was featured in a story with the violin on CBS Sunday Morning.
Anne Akiko Meyers was Billboard's top-selling classical instrumentalist in 2014, a year in which she released two critically-heralded and popular albums. The Four Seasons: The Vivaldi Album, released in February 2014, debuted at #1 on the classical Billboard charts, and American Masters, released in September, was named one of the Best of 2014 by Google Play and called "the most noteworthy new music encounter" of the year by the Chicago Tribune.

 On Serenade, Anne Akiko Meyers -- a champion of living composers -- commissioned seven renowned composer-arrangers to create ten works for violin and orchestra from love-inspired music from stage and film to pair with Leonard Bernstein's "Serenade", which was recorded in anticipation of the composer's upcoming 100th birthday celebration. New arrangements on the album include orchestrations of modern classics such as Brad Dechter's versions of "Laura," Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me," and a bluesy, honky-tonk iteration of "Summertime." "Gabriel's Oboe," arranged by J.A.C. Redford, with its acrobatic, high notes, is juxtaposed poignantly with the solemn beauty of Steven Mercurio's take on "Emmanuel." Matthew Naughtin's tongue-in-cheek "Jalousie," bookended by elements of the Tchaikovsky Violin concerto, energetically flows into Astor Piazzolla's soul-busting "Oblivion," arranged by Peter von Weinhardt, and to the magical luster of Leigh Harline's "When You Wish Upon a Star," arranged by father-son composing duo Steven and Adam Schoenberg. Dechter's soaring reworking of "I'll Be Seeing You" and Bernstein's "Somewhere" from West Side Story close out the album.

Anee Akiko Meyers THE AMERICAN MASTERS Barber - Corigliano - Bates

While I have written many program notes for my own CDs, this is the first time that I have done so for other composers.
There is a reason I agreed so readily to do it this time: Both composers have shared the intimate quality of mentorship with me – Samuel Barber was my mentor, and I was Mason Bates’s mentor. That sense of connection extends to the artists heard here: Anne commissioned both the concerto and lullaby from Mason and me, and Leonard Slatkin, a close friend of mine, has championed all three composers on this disc. Three generations of friendship and shared ideas are captured in this recording.
I met Samuel Barber in the 1960s after sending him my setting for chorus and orchestra of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill. He sent it on to his publisher, G. Schirmer, with a recommendation to publish it, and they agreed. I asked Hans W. Heinsheimer, at the time the famous head of publications at Schirmer, if I could meet Barber, and he arranged for me to see him. At the meeting, Barber gave me some important criticisms of my work, in addition to a lot of encouragement, and this occasion began a mentorship that lasted through the rest of his lifetime. I would show him my work, and he always had something important to say about it. As I developed and grew older, our relationship also grew into a deep friendship that lasted until his death in 1981.
I met Mason Bates, then a Juilliard student, when he brashly interrupted a dinner party I was giving. While my guests stayed in the dining room, he explained that although he knew my studio was full, he had to study with me. I made an exception and took him on as an extra student, both because I had heard his music and felt he had enormous potential, and because of his conviction that working with me would help him. We worked together for several years, and after graduating, he went off into the world and has established a considerable reputation. Mason and I have become colleagues and friends, and even now, he often speaks to me about works he is immersed in. So the mentorship (and friendship) continues… (John Corigliano)

Anne Akiko Meyers THE FOUR SEASONS The Vivaldi Album

American violinist Anne Akiko Meyers has charted out an independent career by dint of unusual programming, an intensely lyrical style, and connections that have allowed her to play a really striking group of violins. Here the programming is adventurous only in the inclusion of Arvo Pärt's Passacaglia in an album devoted to Vivaldi, and indeed the Pärt work seems to come out of left field. Vivaldi's Four Seasons violin concertos are perhaps the most common item in the entire classical repertory, and the accompaniment here by the English Chamber Orchestra, which must have played these pieces hundreds or thousands of times, is standard. But the other arrows in Meyers' quiver don't fail her. The star of the show here is perhaps the violin, an instrument by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù that, Meyers notes, is considered one of the finest in existence, and it's never been heard on recordings before. It was owned by Romantic-era violinist-composer Henri Vieuxtemps, and legend has it that Eugène Ysaÿe carried it behind Vieuxtemps' casket on its own silk cusion at Vieuxtemps' funeral. For the purposes of this recording, though, the relevant information is that Guarneri was nearly an exact contemporary of Vivaldi, and that Meyers draws from it a rather eerie meeting of instrumental sound and composition. The ultra-famous middle movement of the "Winter" concerto (track 11) is well worth hearing one more time here; it simply has very rarely had such a combination of soaring songfulness and sheer instrumental power. The recording of the album was apparently a complex process, taking place at Henry Wood Hall in London with "additional recording done September 6, 2013," in Purchase, New York. Whatever this is supposed to mean, the engineers did their job of getting a really spectacular violin to communicate some of its riches through the digital haze. And that's the main attraction here. (James Manheim)