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Lara Downes
Born in San Francisco of Caribbean and Russian heritage, Downes began piano lessons at age 4, and later spent a decade studying and performing with her sisters in Europe, in what she calls a “gypsy-like existence” that took the family from Paris to Venice, Vienna, Basel and Rome.
Since making early debuts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall London, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Salle Gaveau Paris, Lara has appeared on the world’s greatest concert stages, winning over audiences at diverse venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Le Poisson Rouge, the Kennedy Center to Classical Revolution.
Downes’ solo recordings have met with tremendous critical and popular acclaim. Her last solo CD, Exiles’ Café (Steinway & Sons, 2013) topped the bestseller charts and was called “ravishing” by Fanfare Magazine. Some Other Time (Steinway & Sons, 2014), her recent duo recording with cellist Zuill Bailey, debuted in the Billboard Top 10 and was called "luscious, moody and dreamy" by the New York Times.
Lara is heard regularly on national radio programs, including NPR Music, MPR's Performance Today, WNYC's New Sounds, and WFMT’s Impromptu.
She is the founder and director of The Artist Sessions, a pop-up concert series and documentary series featuring international soloists and ensembles at the forward edges of classical music.
Lara serves as Artist in Residence and Director of the National Young Artists Program at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, UC Davis.
Lara Downes is a Steinway Concert and Recording Artist.
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But Beautiful: My Life with Billie Holiday
by Lara Downes
Every Saturday morning, when I was a little girl, my sisters and I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for what we called “Saturday Classes": piano lessons, theory, music history--serious classical music training for serious little musicians. Saturday afternoons, when we got home, we had a ritual. We'd get out our “dress-up" from the vintage steamer trunk that housed a collection of my mother's 1960's party dresses and my grandmother's furs, go through my parents' record collection--the Beatles, ...
read moreBenny Golson: One Day, Forever
by AAJ Staff
Benny Golson’s latest Arkadia release, One Day, Forever, arose from a taping of some of Golson’s previous band members from the Jazztet: Art Farmer and Curtis Fuller. At the end of a European tour, they were so rushed they that they didn’t record long enough to fill an entire CD. Arkadia owner Bob Karcy kept the tape in the can, and he and Golson kept that recording in mind, in the intervening five years, during which Farmer passed. After Golson ...
read moreCritically-Acclaimed Classical Pianist And Steinway & Sons Recording Artist Lara Downes Provides A Different Take On The Music Of Billie Holiday
Source:
Muse Media
When classical pianist Lara Downes was 8 years old, she wrote in her diary that her favorite song was Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront." Ever since, says Downes, she has been enthralled with “the distinctive qualities of mood and phrasing, line and color” heard in Holiday’s singing. Now, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Billie Holiday’s birth, Lara Downes offers A Billie Holiday Songbook, a deeply personal tribute to an icon of American music (Steinway & Sons Records) ...
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“Addicting - Downes plays with an open, honest heart”— Huffington Post
"An elegant example of how accessibility and a breezy relevance can exist, organically, in a classical music concert" - San Francisco Classical Voice
“A balletic reverie...rendered with nuance and drama” — The Washington Post
“Here is technique so good you’re not even aware of it - she never flaunts it, never gets in the way of the music. You’re only aware that you want to move…” — Fanfare Magazine
“A magnetic force wrapped in flawless technique and a silken touch” — Musical Toronto
