“Pianist Lara Downes left a large audience awed by her technical brilliance and sensitive delving into the music. Her choice of repertoire delighted in its variety and dazzling difficulty.”
- Jamestown Post-Journal
88 KEYS®, Perspectives From The Piano is Lara’s innovative approach to the recital format, offering dazzling performance combined with a pianist’s unique insights into the context and connections around the music. “A voyage of discovery, and fun!” raves the Sacramento Bee about Lara’s popular performance-with-commentary recitals, which have been presented annually since 2004 at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis and at concert venues nationwide.
The "unique blend of musicianship and showmanship" (NPR) that Lara brings to her 88 KEYS® recitals attracts both seasoned music lovers, deepening their understanding and appreciation of familiar repertoire, and new audiences engaged by the entertaining, accessible nature of her programs. Lara’s remarkable rapport with audiences creates a sense of dynamic energy in the concert hall, culminating in a lively Q&A dialogue at the end of each performance.
88 KEYS® programs for 2009-10 and 2010-11:
THE ROMANTICS: Chopin at 200, Barber at 100
THE ROMANTICS celebrates two historic anniversaries in 2010: the bicentennial of the birth of Frederic Chopin and the 100th birthday of Samuel Barber. In this remarkable program, Lara explores the romantic sensibilities of the 19th and 20th centuries in unique pairings of parallel works by these two iconic composers. The music of Chopin defines pianistic Romanticism, with unparalleled lyricism, nuance and expressive depth. Samuel Barber's music, masterfully crafted and built on romantic structures and sensibilities, is at once lyrical, rhythmically complex, and harmonically rich. Together, the two composers represent the transition from classicism to modernity, and the timelessness of the romantic soul.
COMING HOME: American Voices of the 20th Century
Lara's remarkable affinity for American music is showcased in Coming Home, a lecture/recital series celebrating distinctly American voices of the 20th century. This vibrant and atmospheric music, dating from the 1920s-1950s, documents the climate of a rapidly changing America. The big-city sounds of the jazz age, the windswept, dusty sounds of the Midwest, the lean folk music of the Appalachian Mountains, and the stoic self-reliance of the devotional are all heard in the music of Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and others. The program is performed with a backdrop of intimately related contemporary images from American life by documentary photographers of the period, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Berenice Abbott.
WATCH: Video – Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin
LISTEN: COMING HOME concert 2/09 University of Vermont
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A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
Luminous music from the scintillating pianist Lara Downes… dreams of passion and desire, reveries and nightmares; the sublime and the surreal; journeys you take and can’t remember in the morning... A program of virtuoso music of the night, by the great composers of the last two centuries: distinctive, timeless and beloved masterpieces from Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, Barber and Ravel that inspire us to dream all over again each time we hear them.