Anne Akiko Meyers Releases “Blue Electra,” April 11

On Friday, April 11, 2025, the Grammy Award-winning artist Anne Akiko Meyers — one of the world’s most esteemed violinists — releases her latest album on Naxos, Blue Electra, featuring the violin concerto of the same title by Michael Daugherty, a Grammy Award-winning composer. The piece was commissioned by and written for Meyers, who is joined on the album, her 43rd, by the Albany Symphony under conductor David Alan Miller.

Blue Electra, the album’s longest work, is a dramatic violin concerto inspired by the extraordinary life and enigmatic disappearance of Amelia Earhart (1898–1937), the pioneering aviator who, in 1928, became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. A vivid, captivating tribute to the accomplishments and history of Earhart, Blue Electra gets its world-premiere recording. Earhart vanished without a trace in 1937 while flying her “Electra” airplane over the Pacific Ocean. Celebrated worldwide as “Queen of the Air,” she also advocated for women’s rights, taught aviation at Purdue University, and wrote three books and poems. 

Each of the four movements depicts a different period in Earhart’s life; two are musical reflections on her poems, punctuated by movements that imagine her in Paris, following her solo transatlantic flight and during her ill-fated later attempt to fly around the world. The opening section, “Courage (1928),” is a musical reflection on a poem by Earhart before her first flight across the Atlantic. Daugherty responds to the poem with a soaring, tuneful opening, encapsulating ideas of heroism, ambition, and the sensation of gliding thrillingly.

The second movement, Paris (1932), depicts a high-society soirée in which Earhart, having just received the Legion of Honour from the French Government, is guest of honor. The upbeat movement has a jazzy, bluesy air, with complex rhythms and syncopations. The third movement, From an Airplane (1921), takes inspiration from another of Earhart’s poems, in which she dreams of the day she’ll be piloting a plane. The music takes a turn to the meditative and atmospheric, with ghostly harmonics in the violin.

Last Flight (1937), the concerto’s devastating conclusion, is a frightening depiction of Earhart’s disastrous attempt to cross the Pacific Ocean in her Lockheed Electra. Daugherty constructs the finale with rhythms that refer to the SOS distress call in Morse code, climaxing with a repeated open G string in the solo violin that the orchestra then builds to a large crescendo, followed by silence.

Blue Electra was premiered by Meyers and the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, in 2022. Gianandrea Noseda was the conductor.

The album includes two more world-premiere recordings of music by Daugherty. Last Dance at the Surf, which was commissioned for the 75th Iowa All-State Music Festival, refers to the Surf Ballroom in the resort town of Clear Lake, Iowa, not far from Daugherty’s hometown of Cedar Rapids. The Surf is where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper gave their last performance in 1959 before dying in a plane crash caused by severe winter weather. Last Dance at the Surf is a one-movement dance symphony that commemorates that event and celebrates the venue, which was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2021.

Finally, To the New World celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the Moon on July 20, 1969. Daugherty scored the piece, in part, for a brass section with solo euphonium — Armstrong’s instrument in college — and used quotes from Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, a recording of which Armstrong took with him. Armstrong was also a fan of the theremin; to imitate it, Daugherty added an amplified wordless soprano obbligato line to his texture. To the New World was commissioned and premiered by the Pacific Symphony and conductor Jean-Marie Zeitouni.

Anne Akiko Meyers has commissioned, premiered, and recorded violin works that have been performed around the world. In 2024 she received a GRAMMY Award for her live recording of Arturo Márquez’s Fandango with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She has worked closely with some of the most prominent composers of the last half century, including Mason Bates, John Corigliano and Philip Glass, and has appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Evening At Pops with John Williams and CBS Sunday Morning, among others. Anne Akiko Meyers attended the Colburn School of Performing Arts and The Juilliard School, working closely with Dorothy DeLay. She has received the Avery Fisher Career Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Colburn School and serves on the board of trustees of The Juilliard School. She performs on the 1741 “Vieuxtemps” Guarneri “del Gesù.”