Mirror in Mirror

Albumbeschreibung

The American violinist Anne Akiko Meyers has always had a distinctive programming sense to go with her lush tone (sample the title work, Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel, for a splendid example of the latter). But she has perhaps never been more original than on this, her 33rd album. Meyers calls the album one of her most personal projects, and the description holds up even though the recordings were made at several different times. Much of the music was written for her, and she has worked with all the composers or arrangers at one time or another. The sequence of events is unique, with the trio of minimalist works that open the album, all arranged specially for Meyers, not presented as parts of an abstract world of their own -- Glass and Pärt usually get programmed by themselves -- but as participants in a long tradition. They react to Ravel's Tzigane, here offered in a computer realization of its rarely heard original version for luthéal, a sort of piano-cimbalom hybrid. (This is worth the album price by itself.) And they now have inspired successors, such as Polish composer Jakub Ciupinski, who contributes a pair of works for violin and electronics. It's not clear how these were realized in performance, but presumably a visit to an event on Meyers' touring schedule would reveal the secrets; anyhow, they're fascinating and evocative pieces. Meyers' Glass and Pärt also address, and are addressed by, parallel styles closer to Romanticism from John Corigliano and Morten Lauridsen, whose O magnum mysterium fares beautifully in a violin-and-orchestra arrangement. The album is at once intelligently thought out, sensuously beautiful, and deeply spiritual. Highly recommended.

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