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)