Lexus Magazine, Summer 2005 - Dream Jobs

Heart Strings

When Anne Akiko Meyers was a child, her mother fed her meals with Beethoven violin sonatas playing in the background. Today, the 35-year-old violin virtuoso claims that classical music still makes her hungry. "After a concert," she says, "I find myself in a strange city, starving at 1:00 a.m. And no matter how great I felt during the performance, it feels humbling, as I realize then how mortal I am." It's hard to imagine the appetite she's worked up by now — regimented practice every day since the age of 4, grueling international and national concert tour schedules, rehearsals, interviews, meetings with managers and agents. But despite the every-hour-accounted-for discipline her days demand, Akiko Meyers can't imagine living any other way. "My experiences as a musician have been crazy and beautiful. They've shaped my life," she says. "Music is part of my flesh and blood, and I can't imagine living without it."

By her early teens, Akiko Meyers had moved with her mother and sister, away from her father and their home in California, to study with well-known violin instructors. She missed her senior prom, and in fact went to a different school for every year of high school. "Sometimes during my teenage years I felt frustrated working so much," she says. "But it was an expressive outlet, and the violin was a total constant in my life." She arrived at Julliard in New York City at the age of 16 to study with legendary violin teacher Dorothy Delay. In 1993, at age 23, she was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and was the only artist ever to be the sole recipient of this annual award.

Now Akiko Meyers is a soloist with leading symphonies around the world. She recently toured Japan, Spain, and several cities in the United States, and is considered a visionary for her dedication to working with living composers to produce new works. Most recently, she's been recording the original composition "Angelfire," written by the Pulitzer Prize winning composer Joseph Schwantner.

"It's so exciting to have a relationship with the composer," she says. "I might read the score and think that the music should be played soft and lyrical, but really he wants forte, loud." With her violin amplified and four percussionists — rather than the standard one — forte and intense is exactly what the audience at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall premier heard. The recording is scheduled for release this fall by Hyperion. "You practice so much alone in a room that when you play with the orchestra, you finally hear the rest of the conversation," she says. "During performances, music transports us — the musicians and the audiences — to other places."