“Downes' keen music choices and her thoughtful
performances evoke a brilliantly curated art exhibit. On display here –
with all its regret, hope and pride – is America.” – Tom Huizenga, NPR
Album Release Date (Sono Luminus): October 28, 2016
New York, NY – Pianist Lara Downes releases her new album, America Again, on Sono Luminus tomorrow, October 28, 2016. Downes will perform selections from the album at Le Poisson Rouge (158 Bleecker Street) on Monday, November 21 at 7pm, including the New York premiere performances of Angélica Negrón’s Sueño Recurrente, Dan Visconti’s Nocturne from Lonesome Roads for piano, and David Sanford’s Promise. The evening will be hosted by Skip Dillard from 107.5 WBLS-FM, New York's Urban Adult Contemporary station.
America Again was featured this week by
NPR Music’s First Listen
series, and described by NPR’s Tom Huizenga as “a smartly programmed,
wide-ranging anthology of solo piano works by American composers past
and present; male and female; straight and gay; rich and poor; white,
black and Latino.” Read Downes’ essay about the album in
The Rumpus here.
The album’s title is taken from Langston Hughes’ 1938 poem, Let America Be America Again,
and features nineteen pieces selected by Downes that explore the
elusive but essential American dream, written by composers including Duke
Ellington, Lou Harrison, Morton Gould, Amy Beach, George Gershwin,
Angélica Negrón, Dan Visconti, Leonard Bernstein, Scott Joplin, Irving
Berlin, Florence Price, Aaron Copland, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and more.
Lara Downes is a 2016 Laureate of the Sphinx Organization Medals of
Excellence Award, recognizing her influence as an extraordinary artist
of her generation, and her role as a leader in expanding audiences for
classical music. Born in San Francisco and raised in Europe,
Downes' musical outlook reflects the diversity of her personal heritage
and extensive travels. Her interest in connecting music to a wide and
inclusive breadth of human experience mines her own mixed
Jamaican-American and Jewish-Eastern European background. This
exploration has led to a wide range of creative projects for Downes –
from an exploration of the music of Jewish composers in exile to a
centenary tribute to Billie Holiday, from an intimate portrait of the
marriage of Robert and Clara Schumann to a sweeping look at the musical
breakthroughs of the American 20th century, all captured with timeless
relevance and a deeply personal style that the Huffington Post has called, “addicting – Downes plays with an open, honest heart.”
Downes’ 2016 album, America Again, explores music that
expresses different facets of the American dream – its hope, its
impossibility, and its necessity. Lara Downes conceived of the album in
June 2015, in response to the Charleston, SC shooting at Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church. She recorded the album in March 2016 at
Sono Luminus’ studio in Boyce, VA. Downes writes of the meaning in the
album, “Today, as I write these words, we are living again in troubled
times. For too many Americans, circumstance and skin color still keep
the promise out of reach, the dream deferred. The hard-won rights and
long-sought justice for which our parents and grandparents fought are
too easily slipping away. The rifts and rivalries that divide us as a
nation seem to run deeper than ever. But still, we dreamers keep
dreaming our dream. This music is a tribute to the generations of
Americans who dream the impossible: black and white, men and women,
immigrants and pioneers. It tells the story of their journeys, their
loves and longings, their hardships and their hopes. American music is
made of everything we are, coming from so many different people and
places, expressing so many different dreams.”
Highlights from America Again include:
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Deep River, a
traditional African American Spiritual famously sung by Marian Anderson
on the steps of Lincoln Memorial, that tells the long story of black
America's dream of freedom and equality, from the days of slavery to our
own time.
George Gershwin’s I Loves you Porgy in Nina Simone’s arrangement,
which Downes describes as a “moment of perfect convergence – a true
American original bringing to a great American classic everything she
knew about singing the Blues, about Bach (listen to the opening riff!),
being a woman, being black, and about being strong and powerless, all at
the same time.”
Morton Gould’s American Caprice, a mix of
everything that is capricious about the American spirit, from a composer
who lived the American Dream in music, starting out as a
teenage piano player in Depression-era movie theaters and building a
long and varied career that won him the nation's highest cultural
honors.
Angélica Negrón’s Sueño Recurrente, written
in 2002, which brings together the composer’s Puerto Rican heritage
with notes from the place she now calls home, Brooklyn. Downes says,
“This meditative piece speaks to me of the recurring dreams of freedom,
safety, hope, and happiness that call generations of immigrants to
American shores.”
Lara Downes' training under Hans Graf and Rudolf Buchbinder led to
early debuts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall London, the Vienna Konzerthaus
and the Salle Gaveau Paris. She has since won over audiences at diverse
venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to Le Poisson
Rouge and Classical Revolution. Recent performances include Bargemusic,
San Francisco Performances, the Montreal Chamber Music Festival,
Portland Piano International and the University of Washington World
Series, among many others. Downes’ musical collaborations include
partnerships with artists including cellist Zuill Bailey, the Brubeck
Institute Jazz Quintet, the Musical Art Quintet, and composers Mohammed
Fairouz, David Sanford, Daniel Felsenfeld and Daniel Bernard
Roumain. Her original solo performance projects have received support
from prominent organizations such as the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Center for
Cultural Innovation and American Public Media.
Lara Downes’ solo recordings have met tremendous critical and popular acclaim. Exiles’ Café (Steinway & Sons, 2013) topped the bestseller charts and was called “ravishing” by Fanfare magazine. Some Other Time (Steinway & Sons, 2014), a duo recording with cellist Zuill Bailey, debuted in the Billboard Top 10 and was called "luscious, moody and dreamy" by the The New York Times. Her recent chart-topping release, A Billie Holiday Songbook, has
been embraced by both jazz and classical critics and listeners, called
“possibly the most intriguing Holiday tribute” of this centenary year by
Jazz Weekly.
Downes’ live performances and recordings are heard regularly on national radio programs with features including NPR Music, Marketplace, Performance Today, Sirius XM Symphony Hall, WNYC's New Sounds, and WFMT’s Impromptu. She is the producer and host of The Green Room,
a radio show about the lives of classical musicians, distributed
nationally by the WFMT Network. Her writing has been published in Listen Magazine, The Rumpus, Arts Journal and San Francisco Classical Voice. She is the founder and director of The Artist Sessions,
a pop-up concert series featuring international soloists and ensembles
at the forward edges of classical music. Lara Downes serves as Artist in
Residence at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, UC Davis where
she mentors the next generation of young musicians as Director of the
Mondavi Center National Young Artists Program. She is the Founder and
President of the 88 KEYS Foundation, supporting arts education
experiences in California public schools through instrument donations
and teaching artist presentations. She is a Steinway Concert and
Recording Artist.
America Again | Lara Downes, piano | Sono Luminus | Release Date: October 28, 2016
1. Morton Gould:
American Caprice
2. Lou Harrison:
New York Waltzes
3. Traditional:
Shenandoah
4. Amy Beach:
From Blackbird Hills
5. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor:
Deep River
6. Dan Visconti:
Lonesome Roads
7. Ernest Bloch:
At Sea
8. George Gershwin:
I Loves you Porgy (arr. Nina Simone)
9. Angélica Negrón:
Sueño Recurrente
10. Leonard Bernstein:
Anniversary for Stephen Sondheim
11. David Sanford:
Promise
12. Howard Hanson:
Slumber Song
13. Scott Joplin:
Gladiolus Rag
14. Irving Berlin:
Blue Skies (arr. Art Tatum)
15. Florence Price:
Fantasie Negre
16. Aaron Copland:
Sentimental Melody
17. Duke Ellington:
Melancholia
18. Roy Harris:
Li'l Boy Named David
19. Harold Arlen:
Over the Rainbow
