Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers presents the world premiere recording of Billy Childs’s In the Arms of the Beloved featuring the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon. In the Arms of the Beloved is a requiem for Childs’s mother, Mable Brown Childs. It conveys a profound message of hope, love and resilience that is especially poignant in the wake of the devastation from the fires that decimated the communities of Altadena and the Palisades, in Childs and Meyers’s home state of California. “That this work is rooted in the very land — Southern California — that endured such hardship adds an extra layer of emotional depth, making it not just an incredible composition, but a collective expression of grief and renewal,” says Meyers. The piece is scored for solo violin, piano, string quartet, choir, and a small group that includes guitar. The album is rounded out by two short pieces also receiving world premiere recordings in new arrangements for choir and violin solo: Eric Whitacre’s Seal Lullaby, inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s classic bedtime story about a baby seal, and Ola Gjeilo’s meditative Serenity, a setting of the text from O Magnum Mysterium.