FLORENCE PRICE: PIANO CONCERTO IN D MINOR
Lara Downes is known as one of the foremost interpreters of Florence Price’s music, whose solo piano works she brought to the attention of millions of listeners in world premiere recordings with her widely acclaimed 2019 album Florence Price Piano Discoveries.
Since 2019, Lara has shared Price’s 1943 Piano Concerto in D Minor with audiences nationwide, in performances with The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the Detroit Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, the Oakland Symphony, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, and the Brevard Music Center Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta.
This exuberant and sweeping work represents the composer’s broad range of stylistic languages, and the power of her creative expression. The concerto is structured in three distinct sections, opening with a tranquil orchestral introduction and a piano cadenza, and developing into a soaring main theme infused with material drawn from the tradition of African American Spirituals. The soloist and orchestra engage in a virtuosic and harmonically inventive dialogue, leading into a beautifully lyrical adagio, and finally tumbling into a delightfully infectious finale inspired by the African-American Juba dance once practiced on the plantations of the American South.