Lara Downes

Lara Downes – Love at Last (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:30 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone

Love at Last is pianist Lara Downes’s first Pentatone album, inspired by the poem Sachki, Sachki by the Odessa-born Jewish writer Shaul Tchernichovsky. Downes presents 24 pieces, many of them in world premiere recordings, of works by living composers around the globe. Spanning generations, continents and cultures, these diverse voices are united in a stubborn belief in the possibility of humanity, brotherhood, peace, and compassion, and in the everlasting power of love.

An iconoclast and trailblazer, Lara Downes’s dynamic work as a sought-after soloist, a Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, a producer, curator, arts activist and advocate positions her as a cultural visionary on the national arts scene. She was honored as 2022 Classical Woman of the Year by Performance Today.

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Lara Downes & Friends – SETTLE: Migration Music Part 3 (EP) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 17:16 minutes | 147 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Rising Sun Records

As a young musician, concert pianist Lara Downes was often discouraged by the lack of diversity in her field. Downes is half Black, and growing up, there were very few well-known Black composers or performers in classical music. Now today, she’s trying to change that with a project we’ve been following at MORNING EDITION. Each month for as long as she can keep it up, Downes is releasing a mini album meant to showcase the work of overlooked or forgotten Black composers. And you can hear the music on her label Rising Sun Music.

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Lara Downes – New Day Begun (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 58:20 minutes | 488 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Rising Sun Records

“New Day Begun” features works by Black American composers whose music resounds as a celebration of heritage, a cry for freedom, a call to action, and a promise to the next generation. This collection embraces a reawakening, as we emerge from the darkness of pandemic to craft a new American era.

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Lara Downes – LIGHT: Migration Music Part 1 (EP) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 13:21 minutes | 119 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Rising Sun Records

This initiative is created and curated by iconoclastic Billboard Chart-topping pianist and NPR Music personality Lara Downes, inspired by exploration of her own mixed-race heritage as a trailblazing interpreter of diverse American traditions, and building on the legacies of history, family, and collective memory.

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Lara Downes – Holes in the Sky (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:01 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Masterworks

The American pianist Lara Downes is known for unique programming ideas in which classical and vernacular materials mix, not so much in what is called crossover as simply representing parts of a common tradition. She has experience as a jazz pianist and is especially adept at finding pieces from the African-American classical tradition that fit multi-genre programs. Recently signed to the major Sony label (of which Portrait is an imprint), Downes continues to expand her reach. Holes in the Sky, whose title comes from a quotation from Georgia O’Keeffe (“I want real things…music that makes holes in the sky — I want to love as hard as I can”), is unique among Downes’ releases in that among the solo piano works, from composers ranging from Florence Price to Elena Ruehr, there are songs from vocalists of various kinds. All the composers and all the vocalists are women, and Downes provides an elegant reflection on her place in this tradition in the booklet, which also contains a conversation between Downes and folk vocalist Judy Collins about Collins’ contribution, her early song Albatross. This doesn’t cover all the selections on the album, but it is relevant to them all: Downes finds a personal connection in each piece, and as the program proceeds, its power gathers. The piano works and song arrangements come from various places, and Downes weaves them together so that they appear as facets of a diamond. Absolutely marvelous. ~ James Manheim

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Lara Downes – For Lenny: An Intimate Tribute to Leonard Bernstein (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:03:43 minutes | 515 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Worldwide

Pianist Lara Downes celebrates the launch of her Sony Classical debut album FOR LENNY, a Leonard Bernstein centennial tribute that spans the landscape of American music from the past, present, and future. Downes, joined on stage by singer Rhiannon Giddens, presents a portrait of Bernstein the man, full of boundless curiosity and a fervent belief in the power of music to change our world for the better.

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Lara Downes – REFLECTIONS: Scott Joplin Reconsidered (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:00 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Rising Sun Records

Chart-topping American pianist Lara Downes reflects on the music of Scott Joplin through a 21st-century lens, revealing its many layers of genre-blurring subtlety and nuance. Joplin is revered as The “King of Ragtime”. He’s acknowledged as a classically-trained composer of concert music whose ambitions were denied in his own time. He was both of those things, and more – an innovator who merged traditions and histories to make music at the crossroads of the American future. His story is ready to be retold.
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