A new album has been added to the collection: Air - The Bach Album by Anne Akiko Meyers. Unique to this album is Meyers' rendering of the D Minor Double Concerto in which she plays BOTH parts, using both (yes, she owns two of the things) of her Stradivariuses, one from 1697 and the other from 1730. Purportedly, the former was once owned by Napoleon and the latter by the King of Spain. I have several examples of the Bach violin concerti in my musical archives (my favorite up to now being the 1980s Academy of Ancient Music version, with the Double Concerto played by Jaap Schroder and Christopher Hirons), but this is my go-to recording now. I also downloaded from HDTracks a high-resolution 24-bit/96mHz edition -- you can get conventional 16-bit versions from Amazon and other sources -- and the sound quality is stunning.
For more of Meyers, visit her site and her blog. Now check out this pre-release performance of the Bach title piece on the album:
Also, you can read/hear NPR's interview of Meyers here, which has a video clip of her appearance on Johnny Carson's TV show at age eleven.
Finally, I will also share with you a violinist.com interview of a few years ago, where I first came upon this terrific artist, when I was actually trying to track another of my violin favorites, Hilary Hahn. And here is that site's latest on Meyers and her new album. Whew!
They may roll their eyes now, but I am hoping that someday my kids will come to wonder what interests their dad and whether some of his notions might be worth exploring after all.
I sure as heck don't know much about music or art or culture, but I do increasingly find that music, especially, is almost as important as eating and sleeping in how I get through each day. I just want to share this with Nik and Ivi, and if anyone else wants to listen in, welcome! (And one of these days, I might get my photo blog and sites reworked for more of this kind of thing.)
So there you have it -- a highly-biased (mostly) music appreciation course for my kids.
(btw ... most of the snippets of music presented herein are lo-fi, found wherever, often recorded under very unfavorable circumstances and may be almost unlistenable. However, we hope that your interest will be sharpened just enough to seek out proper recordings or performances for the Real Deal ...)
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