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Classical Album of the Week on WRTI 90.1

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Classical Album of the Week: Pianist Lara Downes' Vision of the American Dream

WRTI Your Classical and Jazz Source | By Susan Lewis

Published July 2, 2019 at 11:06 AM EDT

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Courtesy of the artist

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July 1, 2019. The hope in the "American Dream" is heard in the 2016 album, America Again, by pianist Lara Downes. WRTI’s Susan Lewis has the story.

SL_ADLF_170116_LaraDownesAmericaAgain.mp3

Pianist Lara Downes talks about how music expresses the hope and resilience of the American Dream.

Radio script:

[MUSIC: Ernest Bloch, "At Sea," from America Again]

Susan Lewis: Lara Downes, an American pianist with Jamaican-American and Jewish-Eastern European roots, plays jazz, classical, and music that crosses genres. The American dream is a recurring theme.

Lara Downes: Our American story, most of the time, begins with someone’s journey to America, journeys made across the ocean and over mountains.

SL: Her CD, America Again, references the 1935 poem by Langston Hughes.

LD: The poem opens, "Let America be America again, let it be the dream it used to be." I just honed in on this notion of the American dream and what it really means. It led me to a lot of different music and a lot of different stories.

SL: Music rooted in places, from the Shenandoah Valley to New York City; music informed by different cultures that make up America.

[MUSIC: "Shenandoah," from America Again]

[MUSIC: Morton Gould, American Caprice, from America Again]

And what Downes calls the conversation between generations: as in Art Tatum’s arrangement of the Irving Berlin song, "Blue Skies."

LD: I digested it, re-interpreted it, re-imagined it from a classical background.

SL: Music expressing the hope and resilience of the dream.

LD: We have this spirit to us that keeps us trying big things, and falling down, and getting up again. I think for me, the music is really reconnecting us with what is beautiful and true and essential about American life.

[MUSIC: "American Caprice" from America Again]

SL: The music of America Again spans the 20th century and beyond, and includes three world-premiere recordings.

Information about Lara's Promise Project

Lara's latest release is Holes in the Sky, a compilation album that celebrates women's contributions to American music. It features women composers and performers, including violinist Rachel Barton Pine, songwriter Judy Collins, and pianist Simone Dinnerstein. The title references a quote by Georgia O'Keeffe: "I want real things - live people to take hold of - to see - and talk to - music that makes holes in the sky - I want to love as hard as I can."