Interview by Kyle Macmillan
Anne Akiko Meyers has bucked convention and embraced all things new on an ever-adventurous path that has gained her international acclaim.
The 55-year-old American violinist has championed under-recognized masterworks from the past like Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto (1939) and has premiered dozens of works by composers like Arvo Pärt and Mason Bates – enough that she has lost count.
“I’ve always really thrived on working with living composers,” Meyers said. “It came from always wondering: ‘What would the composer say if I could play this for them?’ And there is such a freedom to hear directly from their mouths.”
Colorado Music Festival Welcomes a Bold Collaborator
This risk-taking spirit makes her an ideal match for the Colorado Music Festival, which has put a renewed emphasis on world premieres like Joan Tower’s cello concerto, A New Day, and overlooked offerings under Peter Oundjian, who has served as its music director since 2019.
Meyers will join Oundjian and the Festival orchestra July 17 and 18 for a pair of works from the present and past: Eric Whitacre’s The Pacific Has No Memory and Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane, a popular 1924 showpiece that runs about 10 minutes. (Also on the program are Berlioz’s Béatrice and Bénédict Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture.)
Other than a Sept. 2 appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, these will be Meyers’ only concerts of the summer, a time each year when she likes to regroup and relax after a non-stop fall-to-spring schedule.
She has worked with Oundjian twice before – a 2010 tour of Holland and Belgium with the Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam featuring Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade, after Plato’s Symposium (1954) and a 2004 set of concerts with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.
The Story Behind The Pacific Has No Memory
She has worked with Oundjian twice before – a 2010 tour of Holland and Belgium with the Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam featuring Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade, after Plato’s Symposium (1954) and a 2024 set of concerts with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.
Since 2014, Meyers has been fascinated with the music of Whitacre, an artist in residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale. The Grammy Award-winning composer is best known for his groundbreaking virtual choirs, which have brought together 100,000 singers from more than 145 countries.
“I approached him,” she said, “and I was just so curious if he would consider writing something for the violin, because his work is so haunting and lyrical and beautiful and so exquisite.”
The resulting seven-minute piece, which Meyers describes as a kind of musical reflection, was co-commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Colorado Music Festival. The premiere took place on May 17 at New York’s Zankel Hall.
The catalyst that led Whitacre to write The Pacific Has No Memory was the awful January wildfires that destroyed large parts of the Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods in Los Angeles, including the homes of some of his friends, as well as a narrative thread in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption. The lead character dreams of meeting a fellow prison inmate on a remote beach in Mexico, where the Pacific Ocean will wash away their pain and suffering and the two can start anew. “You really feel these waves within the music – gentle waves and then pain,” Meyers said.
She feels particularly close to this work because her family was displaced from their damaged home in the Palisades and has not been able to return. “It makes me very emotional to play,” the violinist said, “because it’s constantly rolling through the head just how much everyone has gone through here and the loss of community and how everything is just basically washed away. But, then, there are glimmers of new beginnings from all of the destruction.”
From Prodigy to Pop Culture: Meyers’ Unexpected Journey
Far from such darkness was the bright beginning of the violinist’s career. Something of a child prodigy, Meyers performed twice on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson at age 11 and 12 and began touring and recording after signing when she was 16 with ICM Artists, a highly prominent agency at the time.
From the start, she never followed a traditional, buttoned-up classical career path. Besides performing with artists outside the field like pop singer Michael Bolton and jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, she has been featured in television commercials and ad campaigns for brands such as Anne Klein, Northwest Airlines, and TDK.
“They’re fun. It’s different. Why not?” Meyers said, laughing. Plus, those appearances helped her pay for a “nice [violin] bow.”
Anne and the Power of New Commissions
The violinist has been involved in new-music projects almost from the start, and they just keep rolling out. In 2018, for example, she approached Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, and he wrote a mariachi-inspired concerto for her titled Fandango that premiered in 2021 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its music director Gustavo Dudamel.
“It’s a matter of asking these composers,” Meyers said. “They’re walking amongst us, these [Franz] Schuberts like John Corigliano and these great masters. They have so much musical poetry within their minds and hearts.”
She and the LA Philharmonic made a live recording of Fandango in 2022 that won two Latin Grammy Awards for best classical album and best contemporary album. Since its debut, Meyer has gone on to perform it with 16 orchestras around the world.
“It’s so rare for a brand-new concerto that was just born in 2021 to be performed over 40 times now, and there are many more opportunities where people want to hear that concerto because the music is amazing,” she said.
Beloved: Anne Akiko Meyers’ Latest Album of Premieres
Beloved, her 41st and most recent album, was released on May 9. It features the world-premiere recordings of Billy Childs’ In the Arms of the Beloved, Whitacre’s Seal Lullaby, and Ola Gjeilo’s Serenity. All the selections feature the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon.
“That just makes me so happy, to release music like that,” she said. “What story are these composers coming up with that I can sink my teeth into and share with audiences? It’s really kind of a personal choice of what I want to premiere, perform, and record, and it becomes a very rewarding process to work with all these composers, music directors, and orchestras.”
And Whitacre’s The Pacific Has No Memory will give Colorado Music Festival audiences an up-close look exactly what she is talking about.
The Colorado Music Festival hosts Anne Akiko Meyers on Thursday, July 17 and Friday, July 18.
