Anne Akiko Meyers

Violin

Anne Akiko Meyers is one of today’s most internationally renowned and respected classical musicians.   Anne has dramatically expanded the modern violin repertoire with significant new commissions and has made 37 recordings, many of them debuting at #1 on the Billboard charts and becoming staples of classical music radio stations.

New music highlights for 2020 include the world premiere of Arvo Pärt’s Estonian Lullaby for violin and piano, a work arranged for and dedicated to Anne. Meyers will also premiere Mexican composer, Arturo Márquez’s first violin concerto Fandango with Gustavo Dudamel at the Hollywood Bowl in July 2020.

Meyers began the 2019-2020 season performing the Barber Violin Concerto at Ravinia with James Gaffigan and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra.  She debuted Adam Schoenberg’s Orchard in Fog, a work written for and premiered by her in 2018, at the George Enescu International Festival in Romania and continues performing it with the symphony orchestras of Annapolis, Boise, Iris, and Louisville. In October, she appeared with Kristjan Järvi and the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Sapporo’s Kitara Hall and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. In May, Anne performs Arvo Pärt’s music with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra for a special televised broadcast in Estonia.

A champion of living composers, Meyers has dramatically expanded the violin repertoire by commissioning and premiering works by composers including Mason Bates, Jakub Ciupiński, John Corigliano, Michael Daugherty, Jennifer Higdon, Samuel Jones, Morten Lauridsen, Arturo Márquez, Wynton Marsalis, Akira Miyoshi, Arvo Pärt, Gene Pritsker, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Somei Satoh, Adam Schoenberg, and Joseph Schwantner. Anne has premiered new music with the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Nashville, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Washington D.C., Helsinki, Hyogo, Leipzig, London, Lyon, and New Zealand, among others.

Anne was the top-selling traditional classical instrumental soloist in 2014 and her recording of Rautavaara’s Fantasia was selected as the only classical instrumental work on NPR’s 100 best songs of 2017. Recently, John Williams personally chose Anne to perform Schindler’s List for a Great Performances PBS telecast and the legendary composer, Arvo Pärt invited her to perform at the opening ceremony concerts of his new centre and concert hall in Laulasmaa, Estonia.  Meyers also gave the world premiere performance of Samuel Jones’s Violin Concerto with the All-Star Orchestra led by Gerard Schwarz, a nationwide PBS broadcast special and a Naxos DVD release. Her recording of Somei Satoh’s Birds in Warped Time II was used by architect Michael Arad for his award-winning submission which today has become The World Trade Center Memorial in lower Manhattan.

Anne has collaborated with a diverse array of artists outside of traditional classical, including jazz icons Chris Botti and Wynton Marsalis; avant-garde musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto; electronic music pioneer, Isao Tomita; pop-era act, Il Divo; and singer, Michael Bolton. She performed the National Anthem in front of 42,000 fans at Safeco Field (now T-Mobile Park) in Seattle, appeared twice on The Tonight Show and was featured in a segment on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann that became that show’s third most popular story of the year.

Anne has been featured in profiles or performances on CBS Sunday Morning, CBS’s “The Good Wife,” NPR’s Morning Edition with Linda Wertheimer, and All Things Considered with Robert Siegel and recently curated “Living American” on Sirius XM Radio’s Symphony Hall. Best-selling novelist, J. Courtney Sullivan, consulted with Anne for The Engagements, in which one of the novel’s main characters is loosely based on Anne’s career. She collaborated with children’s book author and illustrator, Kristine Papillon, on Crumpet the Trumpet, and appeared as the character Violetta the violinist.

Anne Akiko Meyers was born in San Diego and grew up in Southern California. She studied with Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld at the Colburn School of Performing Arts, Josef Gingold at Indiana University, and Felix Galimir, Masao Kawasaki, and Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School. Anne received the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Distinguished Alumna Award from the Colburn School of Music, the Luminary Award from the Pasadena Symphony and is on the advisory council of the American Youth Symphony Orchestra.  She performs on the Ex-Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesù, dated 1741, considered by many to be the finest sounding violin in existence. Anne and the violin were recently featured on the cover of The Strad magazine in a two-part story.