Pianist Lara Downes will perform her new album, “America Again,” at the Mondavi Center.
Rik Keller Photography
Lara Downes: America Again
Sono Luminus DSL-92207
(Photo: Rik Keller)
(Photo: Rik Keller)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence B. Price, Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington are featured at AfriClassical.com
October 27, 2016
By Marcus Crowder
When pianist Lara Downes performs Saturday, Oct. 29, at the
Mondavi Center, regional audiences will have a rare opportunity to hear
her play live.
Though Downes is an artist in residence at
the Mondavi, her schedule of concerts for the next six months has more
shows in various New York City performance venues (four) than she has in
our region (zero).
Downes, a classical pianist, plays a
genre-blending repertoire. Her solo piano album “America Again,” to be
released Friday, Oct. 28, by Sono Luminus, has already generated
acclaim.
Downes took her inspiration from the great
African American poet Langston Hughes and his prescient, still timely
1935 “Let America Be America Again.” She was preparing to make a very
different album when nine people were shot dead in a Charleston, S.C.,
church on June 17, 2015. Downes felt she needed to make something more
concerned with our country, the times we live in and her feelings about
them.
Hughes’ poem opens with the lines, “Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.”
“I
had the poem in my head,” Downes said. “I had this basic idea of what I
wanted to focus on in the American Dream and the dream deferred.”
Hughes’ poem reflects that dissolution and anger, but it also asks for optimism.
“I think the hope in the poem is essential to me,” Downes said.
The music on her album also reflects a range of emotions and an expansive view of our culture and our country.
No comments:
Post a Comment