Orpheus & Anne Akiko Meyers Beethoven, Haydn, Eric Whitacre & more!

Last season’s highlights included appearances with the L.A. Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, at Carnegie Hall – marking the LA Phil’s return to Carnegie Hall in over 32 years – and at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City. Anne premiered Blue Electra, a new violin concerto by Michael Daugherty, which she debuted to massive critical acclaim at The Kennedy Center with Gianandrea Noseda and the National Symphony Orchestra, a performance which can be streamed on Medici.TV. She also released Mysterium, a recording of newly imagined violin/choral music by Bach and Morten Lauridsen, with Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Shining Night, which features world premieres and new arrangements of music by Bach, Brouwer, Corelli, Ellington, Piazzolla, Ponce, and Lauridsen, with pianist Fabio Bidini and guitarist Jason Vieaux.

Anne has worked closely with some of the most important composers of the last half century, including Arvo Pärt (Estonian Lullaby), Einojuhani Rautavaara (Fantasia, his final complete work), John Corigliano (cadenzas for the Beethoven Violin Concerto; Lullaby for Natalie), Arturo Márquez (Fandango), Michael Daugherty (Blue Electra), Mason Bates and Adam Schoenberg (violin concertos), Jakub Ciupiński, Jennifer Higdon, Samuel Jones, Morten Lauridsen, Wynton Marsalis, Akira Miyoshi, Gene Pritsker, Somei Satoh, and Joseph Schwantner, performing world premieres with the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Nashville, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Seattle, Washington D.C., Helsinki, Hyogo, Leipzig, London, Lyon, and New Zealand.

Anne’s first national television appearances were on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson at the age 11, followed by performances that include Evening At Pops with John Williams, CBS Sunday Morning, Great Performances, Countdown with Keith Olbermann (in a segment that was the third most popular story of that year), The Emmy Awards, and The View. John Williams personally chose Anne to perform Schindler’s List for a Great Performances PBS telecast and Arvo Pärt invited her to be his guest soloist at the opening ceremony concerts of his new center and concert hall in Estonia.

Krzysztof Penderecki selected Anne to perform the Beethoven Violin Concerto at the 40th Pablo Casals Festival with the Montreal Symphony which was broadcast on A&E. Anne also premiered Samuel Jones’s Violin Concerto with the All-Star Orchestra led by Gerard Schwarz in 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 design submission, which today has become The World Trade Center Memorial in lower Manhattan.

Career highlights include a performance of the Barber Violin Concerto at the Australian Bicentennial Concert for an audience of 750,000 in Sydney Harbour; performances for the Emperor and Empress Akihito of Japan; for Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, in a Museumplein Concert with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; and the national anthem at T-Mobile Park in Seattle and Dodger Stadium. She was profiled on NPR’s Morning Edition with Linda Wertheimer and All Things Considered with Robert Siegel, and she curated “Living American” on Sirius XM Radio’s Symphony Hall.

Anne has been featured in commercials and advertising campaigns including Anne Klein, shot by legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz; J.Jill; Northwest Airlines; DDI Japan; and TDK; and was the inspiration for the main character’s career path in the novel, The Engagements, by the popular author, J. Courtney Sullivan. She collaborated with children’s book author and illustrator, Kristine Papillon, on Crumpet the Trumpet, appearing as the character Violetta the violinist, and featured in a documentary about legendary radio personality, Jim Svejda. Outside of traditional classical, Anne has collaborated with a diverse array of artists 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.

Anne was born in San Diego and grew up in Southern California where she and her mother would travel eight hours round trip from the Mojave Desert to Pasadena for lessons with Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld at the predecessor to the Colburn School of Performing Arts. Anne moved to New York at the age of 14 to study at The Juilliard School with legendary teacher, Dorothy DeLay, and with Masao Kawasaki and Felix Galimir; she signed with management at 16; and recorded her debut album of the Barber and Bruch Violin Concertos with the RPO at Abbey Road Studios at 18. She has received the Avery Fisher Career Grant, Distinguished Alumna Award and an Honorary Doctorate from The Colburn School. She serves on the Board of Trustees of The Juilliard School.

Anne performs on Larsen Strings with the Ex-Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesù, dated 1741, considered by many to be the finest sounding violin in existence.

His compositions have been widely recorded and his debut album as a conductor on Universal, Light and Gold, went straight to the top of the charts, earning him a Grammy. His most recent album is a collaboration with VOCES8 on Universal Decca entitled Home featuring The Sacred Veil alongside other works spanning his thirty-year composition career. As a guest conductor he has drawn capacity audiences to concerts with many of the world’s leading orchestras and choirs in venues such as Carnegie Hall (New York), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), the Royal Albert Hall and Buckingham Palace (London). Insatiably curious and a lover of all types of music, Eric has worked with legendary Hollywood composers Hans Zimmer, John Powell and Jeff Beal as well as British pop icons Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap and Annie Lennox. Major classical commissions have been written for the BBC Proms, Minnesota Orchestra, Rundfunkchor Berlin, The Tallis Scholars, Chanticleer, Cincinnati Pops, Kantorei, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, National Children’s Chorus of America and The King’s Singers.

His composition for symphony orchestra and chorus, Deep Field, was inspired by the achievements of the Hubble Space Telescope and became the foundation for a collaboration with NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute and 59 Productions. The film was premiered at Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral, Florida), has been seen at arts and science festivals across the world. Deep Field has been performed in concert on several continents, and with simultaneous film projection by the New World Symphony, New World Center (Miami), Brussels Philharmonic, Flagey (Brussels), Bergen Philharmonic, Grieghallen (Bergen) among other great orchestras. His long-form work for choir, cello and piano, The Sacred Veil, is a profound meditation on love, life and loss. It was premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in Walt Disney Concert Hall, conducted by the composer, and was released on Signum Records. A new version with full string orchestra was commissioned and premiered by Kantorei in Fall 2022. Eric was Composer-in-Residence at Cambridge University from 2011 – 2016.

Widely considered to be the pioneer of Virtual Choirs, Eric created his first project as an experiment in social media and digital technology. Virtual Choir 1: Lux Aurumque was published in 2010 and featured 185 singers from 12 countries. Ten years-on in 2020, Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently – written for the Virtual Choir during the global pandemic that shook the world, COVID-19 – featured 17,562 singers from 129 countries. Previous Virtual Choir projects include ‘Glow’ written for the Winter Dreams holiday show at Disneyland© Adventure Park, California, and the Virtual Youth Choir, a major fundraiser for UNICEF. To date, the Virtual Choirs have registered over 60 million views and have been seen on global TV.

A charismatic speaker, Eric Whitacre has given keynote addresses for many Fortune 500 companies, in education and global institutions from Apple and Google to the World Economic Forum in Davos and the United Nations Speaker’s Program. His mainstage talks at the influential TED conference in Long Beach CA received standing ovations. His collaboration with Spitfire Audio resulted in a trail-blazing vocal sample library, became an instant best-seller and is used by composers the world-over.