Praised by NBC as a »musical ray of hope«, Lara Downes has made it her mission to bring the many different voices of American music into the spotlight. Under the title »Finding Home«, she performs solo piano works by American composers and by artists who found a home in the United States. Gentle and dreamlike, these piano sounds shimmer like a kaleidoscope with the many colours of 20th-century and contemporary American music.
Downes’s passion for finely curated programmes has led to several acclaimed albums, including »America Again« from 2016. Inspired by Langston Hughes’s 1935 poem »Let America Be America Again«, the album reflects the poet’s demand that the American dream should belong to everyone. The Boston Globe described it as »balm for a country torn apart by division«. Her 2024 album »This Land« also explores the United States in all its beauty and contradictions, presenting a musical panorama that ranges from folk traditions to newly commissioned works.
Across all her projects, Downes is deeply committed to performing music that has been forgotten or underrepresented. In the NPR video series »Amplify with Lara Downes«, she regularly speaks with artists, predominantly people of colour, about their music and artistic work. »Finding Home« brings together many of the themes that have shaped Downes’s work in recent years. In the spirit of Rhiannon Giddens, with whom she has collaborated on multiple occasions, Downes contributes names and works by composers that broaden and deepen the musical image of the United States to »Reflektor Rhiannon Giddens«.
PERFORMERS
Lara Downes piano
PROGRAM
Finding Home
A Reflection on Global Journeys and the Echoes of Ancestral Memory
Michael Sahl
Tango / aus: Exiles Café
Kurt Weill
Lost in the Stars
Kian Ravaei
Variations on »This Land is Your Land«
Henry Thacker Burleigh
From the Southland (Auswahl)
Florence B. Price
Clouds
Huang Ruo
Diffluent / aus: Three Pieces for Piano
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
I naviganti op. 13
Miguel del Aguila
Music in a Bottle op. 67
Margaret Bonds
Troubled Water aus: Spiritual Suite
Caleb Burhans
In Time of Desperation
Oscar Peterson
Hymn to Freedom
Ricky Ian Gordon
Finding Home
