🎼 Works:
• Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987)
• Echorus (1995)
• New Chaconne (2024, world premiere)
🎻 Soloist: Anne Akiko Meyers
🧑🎼 Conductor: Gustavo Dudamel
🎻 Orchestra: Los Angeles Philharmonic (Concerto)
🎻 Additional performers:
• Aubree Oliverson, violin (Echorus)
• Academy Virtuosi (Echorus)
• Emmanuel Ceysson, harp (New Chaconne)
🏛 Recording Venues:
• Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles (Oct 2024)
• Zipper Hall, Colburn School (Echorus & New Chaconne – Apr 2024)
💿 Label: Platoon
🔗 Available on all major streaming platforms
By Damián Autorino
Editor at Moto Perpetuo
Few artists have championed contemporary music for violin with as much devotion as Anne Akiko Meyers. Her latest album on the Platoon label presents three works by Philip Glass, with whom she shares both musical kinship and personal admiration. The program includes Violin Concerto No. 1, a modern classic of the repertoire; Echorus, a meditative work for two violins and string orchestra; and the world premiere of New Chaconne, a chamber piece Glass composed especially for Meyers in 2024.
The Violin Concerto No. 1, composed in memory of Glass’s father Ben, marked a turning point in the composer’s career. Commissioned when he was 50, the piece reflects his return to traditional forms after years of experimentation. “He loved all the great violin concertos,” Glass recalled in the album booklet, and this work aspires to join that lineage. Meyers highlights the personal nature of the work: the first notes the violin plays—D–A–D—serve as a musical tribute. Recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, this performance balances lyricism, rhythmic drive, and emotional depth.
The album also includes Echorus, written in the mid-1990s and performed here with rising violinist Aubree Oliverson and the Academy Virtuosi from the Colburn School, where Meyers herself studied as a child. Intended to evoke serenity, Echorus offers a gentler, spiritual dimension of Glass’s sound world.
Closing the album is New Chaconne, a compact but vibrant duo for violin and harp (Emmanuel Ceysson), which departs from the traditional chaconne’s somber tone. Glass opted instead for a quick, joyful pace—what Meyers describes in Gramophone as “the joy of a new friendship.” It’s a piece that reflects spontaneity and warmth, and may be among the final new works Glass composes.
As quoted in Gramophone (June 2025), Glass praised Meyers’ interpretive freedom: “When I hear my music played, interpreted and reinterpreted, I am more interested in hearing what artists themselves can bring to the work than my own ideas about how things ‘should be’. […] Anne brought a sensitivity and understanding to the music which I really enjoyed.” For Glass, this openness to reinterpretation is not a departure from the score, but its continuation.
With this album, Meyers furthers her mission of expanding the violin repertoire through performances that are both deeply personal and widely resonant.
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