According to violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, Shining Night began when she approached composer Morton Lauridsen to ask whether he had written music for violin in a duo format. He had not, but he agreed to arrange two of his choral works; they conclude the program here. Few violinists would have had the idea to ask Lauridsen, a composer quintessentially oriented toward choral music, to do this. Fewer would have juxtaposed Lauridsen with Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling in Love, and fewer still would have been able to make this marvelously varied program hang together. Meyers transforms the basic violin encore type of program into something new and fresh. Her starting point is the long-recognized affinity between Baroque music on the one hand and jazz and pop on the other, and she begins with Corelli and Bach. Meyers inflects this idea in a Latin American direction, and indeed, beginning with Villa-Lobos' Bachiana Brasileiras, one of which is included here, the affinity has been taken up by Latin Americans in various forms. Astor Piazzolla's four-movement Histoire du Tango is a centerpiece, and this work, especially among his output, is underlaid by neoclassical counterpoint. Lyrical Latin American interludes include the familiar Estrellita of Manuel Ponce and the obscure but rivetingly lovely Laude al Árbol, the Laude to the Giant Sequoia, of Leo Brouwer. Meyers has made a specialty of bold, original, and immediate programming, but she has outdone herself this time.
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