Smile

We Say...

Review by John Schaefer

A typically interesting album from violinist Anne Akiko Meyers — which therefore makes it an atypical one for almost anyone else. Meyers' career that has seen its share of globetrotting: she performs Brahms and Beethoven Violin Concertos with major orchestras, while pursuing her own interests in contemporary music and in the music of the Far East. While those interests have occasionally coincided (check out her splendid 2006 recording of works by Olivier Messiaen, the mystical, Eastward-looking Frenchman, and Toru Takemitsu, the Western-trained Japanese composer), this album required a bit more imagination to pull together. Film legend and occasional songwriter Charles (he hated Charlie) Chaplin, Nuevo-tango king Astor Piazzolla and Franz Schubert might seem strange musical bedfellows, yet it all works. In each of these pieces, melody rules. Meyers' playing, warm but understated, keeps emotion from becoming melodrama, as it so easily could in the Chaplin title track, or in the album's finale, "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel Im Spiegel" is a fine example of his "tinntinabulary" style — the violin and piano ring and chime and echo against each other. It looks simple enough on paper, but it takes an almost unnatural amount of concentration to really pull off; Meyers and her longtime pianist, Akira Eguchi, are equal to the task. The Piazzolla works are both among his best-known and most-often arranged, for reasons that become evident when you hear them. Messiaen returns, and so do the Japanese composers: here the prolific and durable Minoru Miki, whose "Haro No Umi" is immediately likable and may in fact sound familiar; and the short-lived Rentaro Taki, whose "Kojo No Tsuki" has a hazy, almost Impressionist sound. In this context, the familiar Schubert Fantasy, Op. 159 could have stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. Instead, it provides an inspired link between the passion in Piazzolla and Messaien's music and the pastoral soundscapes of Miki and Taki.