Anne Akiko Meyers has made a reputation performing works written specifically for her — but she is delighted that some of those pieces are gaining a wider audience.
Meyers will perform Arturo Márquez’s violin concerto Fandango with the Chicago Symphony on Oct. 15-17. Since she premiered the piece in 2021, it has been performed with 19 orchestras, and frequently, she says, “the audience is laughing and crying and and standing on their seats to applaud. It’s exhilarating to be part of that.”
Over her career, Meyers has commissioned several dozen concertos (she doesn’t remember the exact number), but she says the Marquez piece has had “the most unbelievable response globally. It’s amazing to see.” A handful of the most popular pieces she has commissioned “are becoming people,” she says. “They’re born, they find their legs, and they go running.”
When she first heard Márquez’s music about a decade ago, “I was floored that it came from a living composer,” she says. “It feels like music you’ve known your whole life, so romantic and beautiful.” The two of them connected, and Márquez told her that the resulting concerto, based on the sound of mariachi bands, “realized a dream he had had in his heart for 25 years.”
Meyers has been a fixture on the international solo circuit for decades, but she remembers a complicated start when she was simultaneously a student at Juilliard and a budding soloist. “I’d be rushing back from Australia to make my ear-training class,” she says. “But that lifestyle and that career was something I had aspired to have.” After a frenetic period of overscheduling, she was able to find some balance, identifying the meaning of her work as “creating a narrative and sharing it with audiences.”
Of her many commissions, "a handful of the most popular are becoming people. They’re born, they find their legs, and they go running.” — Anne Akiko Meyers
She was also passionate from an early age about new violin concertos. A half-hour conversation brings up the names of Arvo Pärt, Eric Whitacre, Somei Satoh, Michael Daugherty, Mason Bates and Philip Glass. Performing the latter’s concerto with him in the audience, she says, “was like a Hitchcock cameo in his own movie, to have the composer of the work there to communicate with.”
The Mason Bates concerto (“about a flying hybrid dinosaur,” she says admiringly) represents the last time she appeared with the Chicago Symphony, back in 2014. “Every composer is different about the amount of collaboration that takes place,” she says, “but for this one, we had faxes of the fingerboard going back and forth to see what would work.”
For her upcoming visit, she looks forward to working again with Giancarlo Guerrero, who has conducted Fandango with her multiple times, and with whom she recently performed Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 1 in Grant Park.
Although Meyers has performed Fandango nearly 50 times by now, its physical demands make her schedule the work carefully. “It’s 35 minutes, and it’s like running a triathlon,” she says. “It’s so demanding. It’s like being a pole vaulter and a distance runner and working on the bars.”
Márquez is currently working on another violin concerto for her, which she hopes to premiere next summer.
At this point in her career, Meyers does not care if she is pigeonholed as a new-music performer. “I’ve played the traditional repertoire so much,” she says. “Performing 50 Mendelssohns or Tchaikovskys, I’ve done that already.” But performing a concerto written for her allows her to come back to the standards with fresh ears. “What if I could call or text Mendelssohn or Ravel?” she says. “All of them were new at one point. It was a legacy left for violinists in the future.”
She has done her best to add to the legacy, but she does not click with every contemporary composer. “I gravitate toward music that has a narrative arc,” she says. “If it’s too technical, it feels like a kale salad with no dressing.”
