Pizzicato: Shanghai Orchestra Academy collaborates with the European Youth Orchestra

Pizzicato

Over ten members of the European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO) paid a visit to Shanghai Orchestra Academy (SOA) from October 23 and 27, 2017. During the five-day visit, young musicians from several European countries, including the UK, France, Germany and Bulgaria, performed alongside SOA students in routine rehearsals. In addition, SOA organized a series of cultural events, including an educational exchange lecture, giving the European visitors an extraordinary opportunity to learn about Chinese customs and traditions.

Read more from Pizzicato here.

Fort Worth Business Press: Beyond the keyboard - Cliburn career management a key for winners

Fort Worth Business Press
Rick Mauch

June 3, 2017. Daniel Hsu of the United States performs with conductor Nicholas McGegan and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra Saturday during his concerto in the Semifinal round at The Fifteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition held at Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo Ralph Lauer)

There's a lot more to being a Cliburn winner than the prestige that goes with the title. As in other professions, much goes on behind the scenes to ensure a long and successful career as a pianist.

Beyond the prestige, cash prizes and hours of rehearsal, the medalists of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition get the opportunity to launch careers as concert pianists through concert bookings, recordings and significant media exposure via the career management prize.

This year’s top three recipients of the prize will be in town this week for Cliburn Winners Week, which began Nov. 5. The three, who are here for mentoring workshops with industry professionals, are gold medalist Yekwon Sunwoo, silver medalist Kenny Broberg and bronze medalist Daniel Hsu.

"The 1997 Cliburn opened the door to a performing career that I wouldn’t have had otherwise," said Jon Nakamatsu, 1997 gold medalist. "My first appearance as the winner was three days after the award, and the touring has really never stopped. None of this would have been possible without the help and support of the Cliburn."

The Cliburn works closely with each medalist to give personalized mentoring and advice as he or she adjusts to a busy concert schedule and life as a public figure and begins to form long-term plans. It's all part of identifying extraordinary pianists with a clear artistic vision and giving them the platform to share their gifts, according to the organization.

"Since its beginning in 1962, the Cliburn has made concert bookings for its new winners a priority. Over the past 55 years, that program has grown into a comprehensive management program," said Jacques Marquis, Cliburn president and CEO.

Marquis noted that the career management prize includes financial and tax planning help, administrative and tour management support, media and public relations services, and other details that go beyond the 88 keys of the piano.

"Other competitions do provide concert tours or some of these services, but the Cliburn is known for its concentration on this kind of support and for opening the U.S. market for these artists in particular," he said.

The career management prize, including engagement fees the medalists will earn, is valued at over $1.5 million and includes:

*Over 200 concerts booked over three years across the United States (recital, chamber and orchestra);

*Partnership with London-based Keynote Artists Management for international management and concert bookings in Europe and Asia for the gold medalist;

*Internationally released recordings on Decca Gold;

*Complete public and media relations services: New York-based 8VA Music Consultancy for development of online presence (websites and social media) and assistance with media coaching, image consulting and publicity planning;

*International Advisory Council to provide a network of industry professionals who will be actively involved in career development; and

*Administrative services, including travel itineraries.

"First, our mission is to spread excellent classical music to as many people as possible and to discover and launch the careers of exceptional pianists," Marquis said. "We do that through the unprecedented exposure we offer them."

The 2017 competition webcast drew more than 5 million viewers in 170 countries over three weeks, Marquis said.

"But that is just one of the tools we use to achieve what all artists need to start a career. They need to play concerts," he said. "Each winner is a representative of the Cliburn. They are ambassadors performing for patrons all over the world. The more they get to play, and the more supported they are during that pivotal time in their careers, the better for them and the better for the Cliburn.

"Secondly, our career management program is key to attracting the best young pianists to come to the competition every four years. A competition is only as good as the artists taking part in it. The best of the best want to come to the Cliburn because they want the engagements. They want careers as concert artists."

The Cliburn provides individualized care for the three medalists during a three-year period. The idea is to help them develop artistically and to increase their awareness of what they want from their careers and what they need to do to get there.

Marquis said when most competitors come to the Cliburn, they are already considered professionals in that their primary source of income is playing the piano. Winning the Cliburn, though, takes their career to the next level.

"They have to be prepared to go out on the road directly after winning," he said. "They have to have already developed their repertoire extensively and also be mentally and emotionally ready for such a career."

Olga Kern, 2001 gold medalist, said that when she won the Cliburn competition, it was a dream come true. Once it became a reality, however, life got a lot busier, and she is still thankful for the career management prize.

"I got the life of a busy artist, with lots of concerts and opportunities to meet great musicians and collaborate with world-famous outstanding conductors," she said.

Marquis said the Cliburn also wants to instill a fundamental understanding of the more practical aspects of sustaining their careers, from self-promotion, which is vital in today’s digital age, to taking care of themselves and their bodies during grueling travel schedules.

"Our goal is to transition our three medalists to professional management firms within three years of winning the Cliburn. We want to jump-start their careers and open doors, but then we need to find the right fit for each of them with a permanent general manager and, in most cases, regional managers” in the United States, Europe, and/or Asia, he said.

"At a little over a year prior to each competition, we begin booking concerts for the winners of that upcoming competition, so it’s important that we have transitioned the previous winners by that time."

Primephonic: Owning the Music - An Interview with Haochen Zhang Part I

Primephonic
Jennifer Harrington

The morning after his Carnegie Hall performance, where pianist Haochen Zhang stepped in for Lang Lang who had withdrawn for health reasons, Haochen and I met at Knave to talk about his career as a pianist, inspirations in music, and his debut studio recording featuring works by Schumann, Liszt, Janácek and Brahms.

You just performed at Carnegie Hall filling in for Lang Lang. How was the performance?

I played the Yellow River Piano Concerto with the China NCPA Orchestra. The concerto is a cornerstone of Chinese music. It was a refreshing night; the concerto is new in the West so it feels different to perform it in front of this audience. In China, eating Chinese food feels like air, where you are not aware of its existence, but in America it’s like eating your first ever Chinese meal, where you’re acutely aware of the experience and feeling how the audience responds makes any performance exciting.

This has been a fruitful year for you, having won the Avery Fisher Career Grant and your solo album (on BIS) was released this year. Tell me a bit about this positive string of events.

The Avery Fisher is a very encouraging thing for me. It’s a prestige award. Unlike other awards where they give you engagements or performances, it’s the prize by itself (and some cash), and it’s only given to young musicians. Studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a lot of faculty members and renowned musicians started their careers winning the Avery Fisher award. I’m honored to be in this line of heritage and continuity. In a way it gives me more responsibility, knowing that the previous recipients are musicians such as Gil Shaham and Hilary Hahn.

You have won several really impressive competitions, such as the Thirteenth Van Cliburn Piano Competition back in 2009. This must have been a career-changing experience: following this you were propelled onto the world’s most prestigious concert stages. How has your career developed since that time?

I hope I’ve matured, since it was 8 years ago. I’ve been performing a lot of concerts which is a way of maturing yourself. It’s different from practicing yourself. A concert is a different way of learning. And with traveling the world you see different kinds of audiences, where you find cultural differences and most importantly, the solitude you have to overcome on the road by yourself, meeting new people every day. You’re not in a settled community so you have to overcome this to mature yourself. I feel I’ve overcome this. Not only has travel become part of a part of my job, it’s no longer my job. It’s the journey of a musician.

Going back to your album of solo piano works by Schumann, Liszt, Janácek and Brahms, released in February: what inspired you to record this particular repertoire? What was the highlight of creating this album?

At BIS (record label) it’s more about what artistic statement you can make, and in terms of audio quality, most labels choose the standard but BIS is particular because they keep the highest quality by using SACD (Super Audio CD), and they believe in good quality of sound. They also let me choose whatever repertoire I want to play, so I really appreciate BIS.

What do you feel your artistic statement was?

With Schumann, Liszt, Janácek and Brahms, they’re all introspective in different ways. They share this reflective quality which I thought is really precious. Young pianists in my generation are more inclined to play (and the audience is more familiar with hearing) virtuosic pieces. I want to show another side of a young pianist. It feels natural to me. I’ve always been a somewhat introverted person. Growing up in China, which is a culture of inward-looking perspectives, I have this personality and was always drawn to music that has an introspective and reflective quality. You feel like your soul is being cleaned. I wanted to make my first studio recording about who I am and what statement I want to make as an artist.

What repertoire do you hope to explore in your recordings and performances?

I’ve always been a curious person, so I’m looking to explore all kinds of different styles. It interests me more when there are pieces that have an insight into something deeper or are inward-looking, with incredible emotional and intellectual depth. I’m certainly interested in digging into Beethoven, Schumann, and Schubert; and I’m always a Brahms fan and hope to record more late Brahms.

Is there a piece you love to play or that you feel you ‘own’?

That always changes and that’s the beautiful thing about music. There are pieces that you didn’t like two years ago but now you’re falling in love with. There are pieces you regard as something holy or untouchable but now they are more tangible and you’ve pulled the piece from that status to somewhere where you can look at it. And there are pieces you always like and they stay the same for 20 years. In terms of composers, I never found myself having one favorite composer but it always switches through those four.

In terms of owning a piece, the more you play it, the more you feel like you own it. The process of owning it goes with the amount of performances. It’s the physical and spiritual combining together. You feel like your fingers are literally your spirit – what I think, and what I execute, and how people respond to it. That one moment you feel like you are the music and the music is you. That is the most rewarding feeling as a musician.

Schumann, Liszt, Janáček & Brahms: Piano Works

Miroirs CA: In Conversation with Anne Akiko Meyers

Miroirs CA
Leonne Lewis

Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers doesn’t just set the standard; she is the standard. Her internationally acclaimed recordings and performances have a distinction that’s all about interpretative sophistication, silky sounds and crystal intonation. She also has a keen interest in promoting and commissioning works by composers of our time.

A child prodigy in the truest sense, Meyers performed with the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta at age twelve. Her studies include the Colburn School in Los Angeles with Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld, Indiana University with Josef Gingold and The Juilliard School with Felix Galimir and Dorothy DeLay.

Meyers received the Avery Fisher Career Grant award and in 2014 was Billboard’s number one classical charts instrumentalist. She performs a varied repertoire that includes Bach, Bruch, Barber, Prokofiev, Arvo Part and premieres of au courant works such as Somei Satoh’s Violin Concerto, Joseph Schwantner’s Angelfire for amplified violin and orchestra, John Corigliano’s Lullaby for Natalie (for Anne’s first-born daughter Natalie) and cadenzas by Wynton Marsalis for Mozart’s violin concerto No. 3, K. 216.

Meyers plays the legendary Ex-Vieuxtemps 1741 Guarneri del Gesu.

She discusses the importance of playing composers of our time with Editor Leonne Lewis.

HOW MUCH INPUT DO YOU GIVE WHEN COMMISSIONING WORKS BY COMPOSERS OF OUR TIME, SUCH AS MASON BATES’ VIOLIN CONCERTO, EINOJUHANI RAUTAVAARA’S FANTASIA FOR VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA AND SAMUEL JONES’ VIOLIN CONCERTO?

Each experience is a unique collaboration, which is what makes commissioning new works so interesting and inspiring. At the start of a new project, a commission’s length, orchestration and type of piece (concerto, fantasy, shorter work) will be decided. From there, each composer has his or her own process of creation. The Mason Bates Violin Concerto was the first concerto he wrote for any instrument and he had many questions about playability, technical challenges, harmonics, etc. It was very collaborative work and we went through many revisions until reaching the final version.

I BELIEVE EINOJUHANI RAUTAVAARA’S FANTASIA HOLDS A SPECIAL PLACE FOR YOU. WHAT MAKES HIS MUSIC SO RELEVANT?

Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote his fantasy in record time, not changing a single note. I reworked the bowings and a bit fearfully asked if he was ok with this. He thanked me for changing them and said he always found violin bow markings super challenging. After I played Fantasia for him in his apartment in Helsinki he smiled and said how beautiful it was. I couldn’t agree more.

There’s a deep spirituality and feeling of transcendence that comes from Einojuhani Rautavaara’s works. His tonal palette is much like that of a master impressionist painter – Monet to be exact! You feel nature’s grand forces in his music and it deeply stirs the soul.

IN FEBRUARY, 2018 YOU WILL PREMIERE ADAM SCHOENBERG’S VIOLIN CONCERTO WITH THE SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY. COULD YOU PROVIDE A PREVIEW OF THE WORK AND ITS COMPATIBILITY WITH THE VIOLIN. {ADAM SCHOENBERG IS ON THE FACULTY OF OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE IN LOS ANGELES}

Funny you should ask this as I just got the first movement yesterday. Adam showed me a picture of the incredibly beautiful place where he got married. There was an orchard in fog that had a very ethereal quality to it. The first movement is based on that picture, as it possesses a feeling of wistfulness and quiet reflection. He told me to buckle my seatbelt because the second movement will be wicked and super challenging. The last movement returns to the original theme. To be able to discuss the music directly with the composer reveals so much more about a work than just seeing the notes on a printed page.

WTOL-TV: Catch one of the world's greatest musicians at the Toledo Museum of Art

WTOL-TV

Catch cellist Julian Schwarz, heralded as one of the finest musicians of the 21st century, at the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle on Friday and Saturday.

Watch the interview here!

Musical America: Yuga Cohler Nets Orchestra Prize at Toscanini Competition

Musical America
Taylor Grand

Boston-resident conductor Yuga Cohler, 28, has won the Paolo Vero Orchestra Prize at the Arturo Toscanini Conducting Competition, held at the Auditorium Paganini in Parma, Italy.

Read the full article here.

New York Classical Review: Schwarz, Juilliard Orchestra deliver stellar advocacy for neglected American composers

New York Classical Review
George Grella

Gerard Schwarz conducted the Juilliard Orchestra in works by David Diamond, William Schuman and Jacob Druckman Thursday night.

In the middle of the last century, there was a group of American composers who wrote symphonies. Their collected body of work carved out a specific, national sound—skyscrapers and sleek, powerful automobiles, urban sophistication expressed in clear and straightforward language—and did more than the work of John Cage or Steve Reich to make the 20th century an American one for classical music.

Charles Ives and Aaron Copland were specifically not part of this cohort. William Schuman, David Diamond, Walter Piston, Peter Mennin, and others eschewed the self-conscious “American” sound of Ives and Copland, they were modernists working within the classical tradition but without ideology, whether populist or academic—they assumed the worth of the classical tradition and the open-minded intelligence of their audience. Their music reflects New York City in an era when everything seemed possible.

Yet without conductors like Gerard Schwarz this music would remain even more lost, as it incomprehensibly has been for almost sixty years, with the rare exceptions amounting to little more than dutiful condescension.

Thursday night in Alice Tully Hall, Schwarz led the Juilliard Orchestra in Schuman’s Symphony No. 6, David Diamond’s Symphony No. 4, and the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra from Jacob Druckman. And for 90 minutes it again felt like all things were possible.

The last time the New York Philharmonic played these two symphonies was 1958. Their most recent Schuman performance was Andre Previn leading Symphony No. 3—his most prominent work—in 1997. Based on the parochialism of prestige in this city’s culture, that is beyond bizarre.

Nothing could be more fitting than Juilliard musicians bringing life to his substantial Sixth Symphony. Schuman—a native New Yorker who switched from business to start composing at age 20,managed to tear his attention away from baseball to compose around 70 pieces. He was president of Juilliard from 1945 to 1962, during which time he turned it into the modern institution it remains today.

He was also the first president of Lincoln Center and served until 1969. One would expect monuments to him. At least there was this energetic, passionate performance that completed the concert.

Schuman’s Symphony No. 6 is from 1948. Like most of the symphonies of his peers, it’s not about anything in particular except the art of making music. Yet his voice is immediately identifiable. Neoclassical in general, these pieces expressed the virtues of counterpoint, development, and formal structure. To this Schuman added a poly-harmonic language, stacking related triads on top of each other to produce a sound that is tonal but floats free of the usual expectations of harmonic motion.

The Juilliard Orchestra made a big, meaty sound with this, although there were times when the density of the writing turned muddy. There is a coiled physical and psychological energy in this symphony that the players expressed with a real poignancy. It is easy to hear the national exhaustion after WWII in the music, and Thursday night it was also easy to hear a fraught outlook toward the future.

Schoenberg told Diamond that the latter should avoid learning serial technique because he was “a new Bruckner.” That’s not too far off–his symphonies express, in the composer’s words, “strong melodic contours [and] good rhythmic variety and counterpoint.”

He called the Fourth, from 1945, “my smallest large symphony,” and it is indeed a compact, succinct three movements while still having Diamond’s sense of bigness; big, rich sound and a big expressive embrace.

The opening dozen bars, with their polyphony and cascading harmonies, are some of the most beautiful in all the symphonic literature. Opening the concert with the Fourth, Schwarz– a more dedicated advocate of these composers than even Bernstein–maintained smooth, loping tempos throughout, and the musicians produced a gorgeous sound. They didn’t have the professional level of blend, but the music unfolded in phrases that captured Diamond’s art, and the interplay between sections was excellent.

Jordan Bak performed Jacob Druckman’s Viola Concerto Thursday night.

Jordan Bak was the soloist in Druckman’s Viola Concerto, from 1978. Another important New York composer, Druckman was the Philharmonic’s composer in residence from 1982 to 1986 (has son Daniel is a percussionist in the orchestra) and taught at Juilliard and Brooklyn College.

The concerto had a more abstract form than the symphonies, and included an identifiable 12-note row, but as in the others the language was clear and intelligent without being academic or solipsistic. The form is antiphonal, an agon, and Bak was dazzling. A graduate student at Juilliard, he played with a full-bodied sound and exacting intonation and articulation. He overshadowed the composition in that his playing was so constantly involving and impressive that one was drawn to each note and phrase, and often lost the forest for the tree. But what a tree.

This music and these composers, especially Schuman and Diamond, are crying out for performances from professional orchestras. One hopes that last night, someone across the street in David Geffen Hall was listening.

The New Yorker: The Return of Mid-Century American Symphonies

The New Yorker
Russell Platt

Gerard Schwarz, pictured here in 1982, conducts works by David Diamond, William Schuman, and Jacob Druckman, which recall an America that no longer exists. (Photograph by Jack Mitchell / Getty)

The conductor Gerard Schwarz’s upcoming concert with the Juilliard Orchestra, at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday, highlights an essential but overlooked period of American composition: the great mid-twentieth-century symphonies.

There was a time—the late nineteen-eighties and nineties—when it seemed as if the American symphonic repertory was finally taking a definite shape. Neo-Romanticism was the rage among young composers, who were in search of a usable past, and among conductors, too, who were on the lookout for music of recent vintage that their audiences might embrace, or at least tolerate. I remember attending, around 1990, a concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra at which the conductor Leonard Slatkin, a champion of American composers, tested his theory of the ideal program: it would contain a contemporary work, a twentieth-century classic, and a good old classical warhorse. The centerpiece of the concert was Symphony No. 3 by William Schuman (1910–1992), and it anchored the evening emotionally. (It was convincingly preceded by the music of Joan Tower, who is now an admired elder stateswoman, and followed by the music of Brahms.) Written just before America’s entry into the Second World War, the Schuman piece was a perfect balance of mid-century American qualities: lyrical but muscular, sensitive but optimistic, spikily chromatic but clearly tonal, learned in its craft but accessible in impact. The audience, especially revved up by the work’s wallop of a finale, went nuts. Surely, we thought, the finest works of Schuman—and of such contemporaries as Walter Piston, David Diamond, Samuel Barber, and Leonard Bernstein—were here to stay.

Well, three decades later, while Barber and Bernstein have become fixtures of the American repertory, both here and abroad, Schuman, Diamond, and Piston have not been so lucky. Why? You could say that most orchestral administrators would like two warhorses per program, thank you, along with a manageable and brief contemporary work that won’t get in the way. You could also say that the sheer melodic genius of Barber and Bernstein gave audiences a set of familiar musical objects that would greet them warmly at every recurrence. (Barber’s Adagio for Strings is the ultimate example.) But you could say, too, that the mid-century America in which these composers wrote their finest works—the optimistic New Deal consensus that gave us victory over the Depression and the Axis, which carried us into the first wave of the civil-rights era, with its benchmark achievements—no longer exists. The nineteen-nineties, the decade of Clintonian peace and prosperity, which welcomed these pieces back, was a sunset, not a dawn.

One person who never got the message is the distinguished conductor Gerard Schwarz, now a free agent after long stints as the music director of the Seattle Symphony and the Mostly Mozart Festival, who has spent a lifetime advocating for the American symphonic school. He comes to Alice Tully Hall on Thursday night to conduct the Juilliard Symphony in the Fourth Symphony of Diamond, the Sixth Symphony of Schuman, and the Viola Concerto of Jacob Druckman, a younger contemporary of theirs who was Schuman’s successor as the most brilliant orchestral thinker of American composition, as well as its most powerful potentate.

I love this repertory, and Schwarz’s program led me to dive back into some favorite recordings. Let’s start with the Diamond Fourth (1945), as does Schwarz. Diamond was a complicated man but a straightforward composer, and his best work combines a rock-solid technique based in the music of Bach and Stravinsky with a direct and openhearted American mood. The Fourth’s divertimento-like first movement is affable and airy but driven and intense:

Schuman’s Sixth Symphony, a one-movement work of tragic breadth, was written in 1948, for the Dallas Symphony, just after the war that the Third Symphony’s appearance had heralded. But in the midst of the war he composed what, to me, is his finest symphony, and perhaps the most perfect one of the American canon, the Fifth (Symphony for Strings). Its slow second movement, which combines genuine elegy with angered vigor, is of shattering lyrical power; the vanishing of this piece from the stages of America’s major orchestras is truly bizarre. The classic recording is Leonard Bernstein’s, with the New York Philharmonic:

The entirely postwar career of Druckman (1928–96) marks the era when Americana composers had to face up to the challenge of international modernism, and the more cerebral worlds of Webern, Boulez, and late Stravinsky. Druckman, who trained at Juilliard and in Paris, and who spent the final decades of his prestigious academic career at the Yale School of Music, became a master of the new aesthetic but was never completely absorbed by it. Druckman’s great gift was his ability to infuse his modernist impulses with the gamut of sensuality, from the most delicate refinement to the utmost crudeness, in startlingly vivid instrumental hues. An album by the Philadelphia Orchestra, in glorious full gleam, on the New World Records label, features not only Druckman’s Viola Concerto (1978), a gripping and dramatic piece, but also “Counterpoise” (1994), a lovely orchestral song cycle that was his last major work. The extreme contrast between the texts that Druckman chose for the piece—two poems in English, by Emily Dickinson, and two more in French, by Guillaume Apollinaire—symbolize not only Druckman’s creative conflict but also the struggle of intellect and instinct that remains essential in American culture.

The New York Times: Hear the Martha Argerich Recording That Inspired Yekwon Sunwoo

The New York Times
By Joshua Barone

Martha Argerich, one of the greatest pianists in the world, rarely plays in New York. But on Oct. 20, she will return to Carnegie Hall after a decade away to perform Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3. For her younger fans, this may be the first opportunity to hear her in person.

Being a devotee of the elusive Ms. Argerich, 76, most often means being a follower of her diverse and much-adored catalog of recordings. Her albums, which have been in circulation since the 1960s, have been formative for many musicians who have come after her.

“A young pianist has to know her work,” Vikingur Olafsson, 33, said in an interview. “She has influenced my generation in ways that cannot be overestimated.”

We asked some of the most talented younger pianists (and one harpsichordist) to share and discuss their favorite Argerich recordings. Their answers — and the music — are below.

Yekwon Sunwoo
Ravel: ‘Scarbo’ from ‘Gaspard de la Nuit’

Yekwon Sunwoo, the 28-year-old South Korean pianist who won this year’s Cliburn Competition, loved Ms. Argerich’s recording of “Gaspard de la Nuit,” but then he found a video of her playing the piece.

The first movement, “Ondine,” had a “wonderful sense of singing melody while the waves never stopped with such grace — effortless,” he said. And the finale, “Scarbo,” both “evaporated into the atmosphere” and “sparkled with so many different layers of sounds.”

Mr. Sunwoo looked to Ms. Argerich’s “Scarbo” for inspiration when he learned the piece. “I particularly admired her incredible velocity over the keyboard, but with musical intentions,” he said. “I tried to create more drama and sweeping gestures like she does.”

Miroirs CA: Anne Akiko Meyers with Philharmonia Orchestra

Mirroirs CA
By Leonne Lewis

Anne Akiko Meyers gives transcendent and breathtaking performances in this new release of works by Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016), Karol Szymanowski and Maurice Ravel – using her Ex-Vieuxtemps 1741 Guarneri del Gesu - with beautifully crafted support from the Philharmonia Orchestra under Kristjan Jarvi.

Szymanowski’s first violin concerto, Op. 35, Ravel’s Tzigane and Rautavaara’s Fantasia all have the element of fantasy and rhapsodic sweep, particularly Fantasia which Meyers commissioned and premiered in March of this year with the Kansas City Symphony. While this celebrated Finnish composer’s works may not be well known to American audiences, Rautavaara’s early studies did include The Juilliard School with Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions.

One may detect in his writing hints of countryman Sibelius with overtones of The Swan of Tuonela, for example, but Rautavaara’s compositional style seems to contain a unique, lush and brooding landscape of intertwining melodies and imitative sequences between violin and orchestra.

From the opening chord, the listener enters a sound world that is absolutely mesmerizing for its dark, overlapping textures where demure to red-hot melodic waves of sonority from brass and strings provide a backdrop of atmospheric tension for Meyer’s flowing passagework. Her tone takes on an ethereal quality that goes right to the heart and core of the work’s veil of mystery.

She also displays an affinity for Szymanowski’s violin concerto (1916), an impressive piece of orchestrated splashes, clashes, interludes of harp, winds, especially flutes and an opening Vivace Assai that conjures up the opening temperament of Ravel’s piano concerto in G major. This composer’s Mazurkas for piano, among other compositions are worth a listen.

Meyer’s account contains a kinda introspective elusivity that includes lingering slides AND a display of turbocharged fingerwork in the Cadenza that has the characteristics of a Paganini Caprice gone avant-garde – of which we might also thank Polish violinist Paul Kochanski for input to this work, to whom it is dedicated.

Meyer’s declamatory bow strokes in the opening of Tzigane combined with rhythmic punch and rich harmonics brought this gypsy inspired work to a frenzied conclusion. It’s not often that collaboration between orchestra and soloist is so perfectly matched but supernova violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and the Philharmonia Orchestra under Kristjan Jarvi have hit a home run, even a grand slam with this recording!