Reader's Digest: The Power of Music - Lara Downes reflects on the beautiful soundtrack to her life

Reader's Digest
By Lara Downes

Photo: Anthony Tremmaglia for Reader's Digest

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. After 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 1960s party dresses and my grandmother’s furs, go through my parents’ record collection—the Beatles, Sinatra, Charles Aznavour, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday—and dance around the living room. The Billie Holiday records stopped me in my tracks. I was enthralled by Lady Day, her dark eyes shaded by a white gardenia, her world-worn voice, and the mood and phrasing, line and color that she brought to even the simplest tune.

In my diary, when I was eight, I made a careful list in perfect cursive of all my favorite things. My favorite song was Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront”—such a sad song, about watching and waiting for a love that’s gone. That year was the last year of my father’s long, slow dying. After he passed away, I spent foggy afternoons at the window, looking out over the San Francisco Bay, waiting for the grief to lift. I pulled out the old records at night. “I cover the waterfront,” Billie sang. “I’m watching the sea / Will the one I love be coming back to me?”

My father was born in Harlem and grew up steps from the clubs where jazz blossomed in its golden age and where Billie Holiday was singing during his childhood. He loved jazz. In my earliest memories, he is listening to records, the long length of him stretched out in our living room. In the end, he left us the memories and the records.

Our family buried our loss in our music. My mother took me and my sisters to Europe, where we lived in the great capitals and studied at the great conservatories with the legendary artists of a quickly vanishing generation. It was a very different life, surely, than the one my father had imagined for us. American culture was something far away, accessed through overdubbed TV reruns, the occasional jar of peanut butter from an Army base commissary, and the cheap East Bloc bootleg jazz CDs we bought at open-air markets.

My sisters and I were growing up. I had my first love affairs. I spent one cold winter in Vienna practicing Schumann all day and listening to Billie Holiday records all night, missing a boy an ocean away. Schumann and Lady Day both knew a thing or two about heartache. “I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you,” she sang.

Ten years later, I moved back to the States. I made my way, very alone, through the unknown landscape of the New York music world. I was starting over, and it was hard. There were moments of despair and defeat. I practiced Ravel and Liszt all day in a windowless sublet and listened to Billie Holiday records at night. “Beautiful to take a chance,” she sang. I found new courage and took some chances and had some astonishing luck—a competition win, a Carnegie Hall debut recital, a recording contract.

I was hungry for American music, for a reconnection with what was home. I played music by Copland, Gershwin, Bernstein, Ellington. There was something I needed to find in a musical tradition “beyond category,” as Ellington put it—a musical sea made of waves of immigration and tides of change. This distinct sound, from the concert halls to the clubs, spoke to me because it is everything we are, coming from so many different places and people.

On my bedside table I have two posed studio photographs from the 1930s. My two grandmothers: Grandmother Fay, one of seven sisters born to Jewish immigrants from the town of Belz in Ukraine, who grew up in Buffalo, New York, and came out to San Francisco when my mother settled there, who lived just a few blocks away from us when I was little but whose story I wish I knew better. And my Jamaican grandmother, Ivy, who moved as a young woman to Harlem, who died when my father was very small, and whose story is lost to family history and memory except for the equation of nose and cheekbones that I see whenever I look in the mirror.

My story of race and roots is captured in these two faded portraits. Two women, looking out at me in the bloom of their youth, framed inside the parameters of a time in which a relationship between them would have been buried under layers of impossibilities and prejudices. Looking into their eyes, I see proof of how much change has come in two short generations, how very recently their granddaughter’s version of American life became possible.

My parents met at a sit-in in San Francisco in the mid-’60s, and they dreamed for their three caramel-colored girls of a future color-blind America in which race wouldn’t matter. But, of course, it did. From the beginning, I was well aware of the undercurrent of racial complexities and complexes that run through our culture. Being caramel colored in America comes with a burden of confusions, assumptions, and questions. Living abroad shifted that burden, but when I came back, I felt it again.

A musician is born and then made. Everything folds together: all the music you hear, study, practice, and perform, all the lessons you’re taught and the ones you learn on your own. So when I decided to pay tribute to Billie Holiday by recording a piano album of her songbook, I had to take a hard look at this lifetime I’ve lived with her music. I had to turn back to the nights when her voice had sung me out of sadness to sleep, back to those Saturday afternoons of my childhood, and to ask myself what I’d learned from her, as a musician and a woman.

She was one of the most innovative and distinctive musicians of any genre. She was a brilliant, mesmerizing, self-destructive woman whose life swung from tragedy to triumph and back again. Her voice spoke volumes about hard living and heartbreak and about improvising your way through it all. She took a song, any song, and made it immediately and forever her own. She didn’t follow anyone’s rules. “If I’m going to sing like anyone else,” she said, “then I don’t need to sing at all.”

When I was eight, Billie Holiday’s music taught me that something beautiful could be made from sadness. For a musician, that is one of the most powerful lessons to learn. It’s what saves us. She lived a short and troubled life, but the happiness and luck that she did find, she found through music. And finding your joy and strength in music is something I know. I know what it’s like, when things have fallen to pieces, to put on a satin dress and go onstage and find the secret power of a woman in a satin dress and make your listeners fall in love with the music. Just like I fell in love with Billie Holiday’s songs.

She gave away her heart boldly and foolishly, and every time it was bruised, she turned that pain into something graceful and moving, in a song. “Love is funny or it’s sad, it’s a good thing or it’s bad,” she sang, “but beautiful.” There have been times when I’ve given my heart at the wrong time to the wrong man. One spring I played Rachmaninoff during the day and listened to Billie Holiday at night. “I’m a fool to want you,” she sang, a phrase I echoed in my head.

It’s been hard to hold on to hope this year. I’m raising a caramel-colored boy of my own and would like to think that my parents’ dream can come true for him. But I am afraid it is still out of reach. I’ve been sad and turned to the music that taught me how to find the beauty in pain. I’ve been playing Billie Holiday songs across America with my musician’s voice reaching back to join hers. I’ve met people who heard her sing in Harlem when my father was a boy, people who were her friends and lost her too soon, people who have lived their whole lives with her records, as I have.

This music has made me new friends, told me new stories, brought back things I thought I’d lost a long time ago. It’s brought me home. After all the years, all the travels, all the music, I’ve understood the lesson I’ve learned from Lady Day: that the magic in making music, as in living life, is to forget about all the definitions and rules you ever learned, to lean back against the launchpad of your history and your experience, your losses and heartaches and joys, to look out into the future and to make something that is completely your own. Something that reaches deep to your center and pulls out a truth powerful enough to illuminate the moment and to shine far ahead, into memory. Something unexpected, something indefinable, perhaps complicated, but beautiful.

Listen to the music that inspired this essay here.

Pianist Lara Downes Wins $50,000 Medal of Excellence

The Sphinx Organization announces Lara Downes as a recipient of the 2016 Medal of Excellence and $50,000 Artist Grant. Sphinx is a Detroit-based national organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts. The organization's annual awards honor outstanding artists of color who demonstrate artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and great potential for leadership. Lara Downes joins soprano Julia Bullock and cellist Gabriel Cabezas as 2016 honorees. For more information, visit http://sphinxmusic.org/sphinx-medals-of-excellence.html.

GQ Germany: Lang Lang Named "Man of the Year"

Lang Lang was named one of GQ's "Men of the Year" for his active and innovative social media presence.

See a related Süddeutsche Zeitung article by clicking here.

Lara Downes Releases "A Billie Holiday Songbook"

Steinway & Sons celebrates the centenary of iconic jazz singer Billie Holiday with an album of songs she made famous, arranged for solo piano by New York-based composer and pianist Jed Distler and performed by Steinway artist Lara Downes. The result is a musical portrait of the singer’s life.

Available on CD and MP3 via ArkivMusic.com: 

www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=1673717#custReviews

Washington Post: Pianist Lara Downes gives insightful performance of Czech composers

Washington Post
By Stephen Brookes

Franz Kafka may have been ignored in his own lifetime, but his novels — and the sense of dread and alienation they evoke — came to have an extraordinary impact on the 20th century mind. So it was intriguing to hear pianist Lara Downes at the Embassy of the Czech Republic on Thursday evening, playing music by Czech composers who endured the rising totalitarianism that Kafka’s writing seemed to presage — and who were either killed by it or forced into decades of exile.

Perhaps the most tragic of these was Erwin Schulhoff, who produced an astonishingly innovative body of work — including the “Suite Dansante en Jazz,” which Downes opened with — before dying in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. The six-movement suite is an earthy, slow-burning piece from 1931, bluesy at its heart but imbued with edgy, wildly colored, often brilliant ideas, and Downes gave it a fine reading — more thoughtful than sensual, maybe, but very engaging.

She followed with Andre Singer’s “Nine Parables to Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika,’ ” which alternated short passages from Kafka’s enigmatic 1914 novel with equally enigmatic and expressive musical fragments — a fascinating work from Singer (who was forced into exile in the 1930s) that seemed to capture a complex and Kafkaesque world where nothing is what it seems to be. Robert Rehak and Mary Fetzco delivered the written passages with aplomb.

Jaroslav Jezek’s lovely “Svita” (Shining) — famous for boosting Czech morale during World War II — provided a few moments of sunshine, as did five of Bohuslav Martinů’s “Etudes and Polkas.” Written in exile (where the composer spent much of his life), these brief pieces seemed to evoke both the freedom of a new world and nostalgia for the old; a poignant glimpse into the heart of the exiled composer.

The final work on the program was the biggest but the least satisfying. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a remarkable prodigy, and his Sonata No. 2 in E Major, Op. 2, written when he was all of 13 years old, is a remarkable accomplishment for an adolescent, technically accomplished and ambitious in every way. That said, it’s a noisy show-off piece, full of heroic chest-pounding and thundering charges up and down the keyboard, anchored by a largo con dolore that fairly wallows in adolescent woe. Downes — who admitted that Korngold was “the new love of my life” — gave the thing an impassioned performance, but it was her insights into the more complex, understated and subtle works on the program that more deeply impressed.

Critics rave about Lara Downes and Zuill Bailey's "Some Other Time"

Pianist Lara Downes and cellist Zuill Bailey have each, in their own way and quite often together, been credited with seeking out new ways of presenting classical music, of reinventing the art of the recital for our time. But for both of them, the tireless quest to touch audiences through reawakening their musical curiosity owes everything to the pioneering spirit of earlier American composers. To Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss and articulated most charismatically by Leonard Bernstein. Their new album Some Other Time released by Steinway & Sons digitally on April 1st and physically on 29th, 2014, takes its title from a number in Bernstein’s musical On The Town. It’s a number about moving on, about remembering a great adventure, but with the promise that it will all come together another day, another time. Except that, for Lara Downes and Zuill Bailey, that time is now.

Here is what the critics are saying about Some Other Time:

Classical Candor reviews the album here.

"What more could you ask for than a collaboration between preeminent cellist Zuill Bailey and innovative pianist Lara Downes? I've admired their work separately for several years already, and now they've produced an album together...And just to make myself clear, the music, the performances, and the sound are extraordinary."

WGBH Boston's CD of the week.

"Cellist Zuill Bailey and pianist Lara Downes have collaborated on a recording inspired by friendship, adventure, and nostalgia."

And All Music Guide raves!

"The recital as a whole is engaging, original, and insightful, bringing together a particular musical scene in a fresh way, and the studio sound is superb. Highly recommended."

Crazy or brilliant? Anderson & Roe's reimagining of The Rite of Spring

“They turn the Rite Of Spring back into theatre - you could reach out and touch it. One of the most exciting performances I've ever seen”
- Stephen Tobolowsky, actor and director

Outside of Hollywood action movies, it is not usual to announce the release of a trailer as though it were news. In this case, though, we venture to suggest that it is. Classical pianists Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe have been reinventing the art of the classical music video for years, building a seven million-strong following on YouTube and winning an Emmy nomination (with their version of Schubert's Erlkönig) through their bold and wildly creative imaginings.

We learn some of the vivid details about their latest, THE RITE OF SPRING, through the trailer - snatches of fantastical images are seen, insects crawling on the pianists' hands as they play, dancers cavorting hypnotically around the musicians, lights, colours, streamers, petals ascending into the wind, a gallery's-worth of images that promise to brand themselves on the viewers' memories. In a shoot that crossed the United States and saw its protagonists filmed, variously, from an airplane in the Californian desert and naked in the ocean at night, there has rarely been a classical music film that has gone to anything like these lengths to get close to the composer's own shockingly vivid creation.

The trailer can be viewed here.

As previously announced, THE RITE OF SPRING will be released in segments (as it is composed), one every two weeks starting from the date of the work’s centenary, It will be free to view on YouTube at Anderson & Roe’s channel from May 29..

Experience Anderson & Roe's breathtaking new film of The Rite of Spring

“An epic journey
of struggle and sacrifice,
risk and renewal,
and the worlds that exist without and within.

Two outsiders shed their exterior identities,
unveiling their true selves.

Brave the elements
Shed the material
Become one with Nature”

Classical pianists Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe are different. A piano duo who have attracted legions of new fans with their virtuosic and acclaimed arrangements of popular hits (such as their “Billie Jean” cover or their Star Wars Fantasy), they are musicians who bring the care and stunning imagination of brilliant indie filmmakers to their YouTube music videos, pushing the form forward. Case in point: their Schubert Lied-turned-horror-film Der Erlkönig – which, as we go to press, has just been nominated for an Emmy Award.

If they attract full houses across the US and internationally with their live shows, they have made an art of presenting classical music on YouTube, producing and directing videos that have been viewed by millions. “We cater our performances to the venue, whether it be a concert hall or online, and as such, we design our YouTube videos to potently deliver the spirit of the music in a bustling graphic environment,” says Anderson. But even they have never previously attempted anything on the scale of The Rite Of Spring.

To be released in segments (as it is composed), one every two weeks starting from the date of the work’s centenary, Anderson and Roe’s Rite takes the viewer on an epic journey but one that finally mirrors the primeval nature of the work itself. Starting in traditional concert trappings, the performers become gradually sucked into a ritualistic spiral that sets them immersed in a troupe of dancers, crawled on by insects, lost in a hallucinatory world, naked in the ocean, or alongside an antique instrument ablaze in the desert. What is real? What is imaginary? One thing is for sure - theirs is a striking, strident view of music that ripped apart the culture of its time, and this film proves it can still unsettle and thrill us today. In this year of the Rite’s centenary, this interpretation will leave a mark – a scar? – and, perhaps, help to redefine it.

THE RITE OF SPRING will be free to view on YouTube at Anderson & Roe’s channel from May 29… Watch Anderson & Roe’s Emmy-nominated video Der Erlkönig here.

Notes for Editors:

* California-based Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe are among the most exciting, groundbreaking piano duos performing today, with nearly seven million page views on their YouTube channel and a busy national and international touring schedule

* Their YouTube music video, Der Erlkönig, has just been nominated for an Emmy Award

* THE RITE OF SPRING uses a cast of 21, and involved a shoot that criss-crossed the U.S., from Los Angeles and New York to Palm Beach, South Carolina and a Southern Californian desert, even involving filming from an airplane – a “Making Of” documentary will be released at a later date

* THE RITE OF SPRING is conceived, edited, co-filmed, produced and performed by Anderson and Roe. As if that weren’t enough, while filming a scene with an organ in the ocean, Greg Anderson’s large toenail was completely ripped off! No animals were harmed while filming. Just the toenail.

* Their most recent album, “When Words Fade,” was released by the Steinway label and spent nearly a dozen weeks at the top of the Billboard classical charts

* They recently announced an “Anderson & Roe”-branded publication deal for their piano duo arrangements with Alfred Music Publishing

* Alumni of The Juilliard School (where they met), they have broadcast on MTV’s Total Request Live, NPR’s All Things Considered and From The Top, APM’s Performance Today, and KBS’ Classic Odyssey. They left an indelible mark at their alma mater, directing the 2004 performance project “Life Between The Keys” and appearing on the Sounds of Juilliard CD celebrating the school’s centennial year

Lara Downes launches The Artist Sessions at Yoshi's Jazz Bar

Iconic San Francisco venue the location for Downes’s series, blending musical innovation with intriguing themes and fascinating conversation (and cocktails)

California-based Lara Downes, widely acknowledged as a trailblazer in reinventing the solo and chamber piano show, will present the first in her new concert series, The Artist Sessions at the famous Yoshi’s Jazz Bar in San Francisco. The monthly series will present some of the world’s leading classical musicians in innovative contexts – in short, every concert will have its ‘story’.

First up is Lara herself, alongside guests the San Francisco Quartet and Rik Malone, host of Classical KDFC. The evening will be based around music of exile and Lara’s own new album Exiles Café (on the Steinway label) – the album was CD of the Week simultaneously on WQXR and WFMT and shortly afterwards on Classical KDFC. Downes is in the midst of an extensive North America tour of Exiles Café.

Also on the bill for later in the series are Christopher O’Riley (May 29), Gabriel Kahane (Sept 5), Awadagin Pratt (Oct 17), Theo Bleckmann (Nov 14), Dan Tepfer with Lara Downes (Dec 12), Alexandre Da Costa (Jan 16), Mohammed Fairouz (Feb 27), Zuill Bailey with Lara Downes (March 11), Anthony de Mare (March 25) and Matt Haimovitz (April 6). Cocktails and supper will be offered during the performances, as will full dinners in the adjacent award-winning new-style Japanese restaurant.

Yoshi's is one of the foremost venues for music in the US. Originally opened by Yoshie Akiba, her husband Kaz Kajimura, and chef Hiroyuki Hori as a restaurant, it soon became as well-known for its jazz. What started as a sideline to entertain diners became the main event. Showcasing international stars such as Chick Corea, Ravi Coltrane and Jack DeJohnette, it has become a pacesetter on the US jazz scene. The Artist Sessions aims to do the same from the classical music standpoint for Yoshi's San Francisco.

Watch Lara Downes's new music video, Tango from the Exiles Cafe - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy7-CJmtN3U

Notes for Editors

* Lara Downes is long-term Artist In Residence at the prestigious Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at University of California Davis. Her performances have been heard on NPR's "Performance Today", WNYC's "New Sounds", All Classical FM, WFMT Chicago and WBGO's "Jazz Set" among others

* Her recordings have been called, variously, "magical" (NPR), "addicting" (The Huffington Post) and "something magnificent and different" (Sequenza 21)

* She has worked with many fellow leading American artists, among them Lara St John, Zuill Bailey and Rachel Barton Pine. Commissions for Downes have come from Aaron Jay Kernis, David Sanford and Benny Goson among others, while she has enjoyed cross-genre collaborations with the likes of former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove, choreographer David Grenke, video artist Glenda Drew and director/chorographer Mindy Cooper.

* Downes is the Founder and President of the 88 KEYS Foundation, a non-profit organisation that fosters opportunities for music experiences and learning in America's public schools, and she nurtures next-generation musicians as curator of the Young Artists program at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at University of California Davis. Lara Downes is a Steinway Artist.

Oregon Arts Watch: A Classical Pianist Creates 21st Century Opportunities

Oregon Arts Watch
Written by Jana Hanchett

While the stodgy classical world bemoans its diminishing cultural relevance, Lara Downes is embracing the 21st century. “I feel grateful to have grown up in a generation that has faced the absolute end of an era,” the Bay Area-based pianist says.

Downes sees the end of one era as the beginning of the next, and she uses contemporary technological savvy to create a welcoming space for classical music in today’s culture. Her website is far user-friendlier than many classical sites, and her blog offers her own probing interviews with other pianists and insightful experiences. Downes also provides easy access to her music by posting her music trailers on YouTube and offering her albums on Spotify. In concert, she often uses a Bluetooth-enabled pedal to turn the score pages on her iPad, rather than employing an old school paper score.

Giving herself the freedom to play from the score instead of from memory provides a common-sense solution to the challenges of contemporary times.

“We’re not working anymore in an age in which an artist tours all year with one or two recital programs, a repertoire of maybe 12 or 15 pieces per season (or beyond), and an interface with audiences that involves solely playing those pieces, bowing, and going back to the green room!” Downes explains. “So the ability to relate to the printed page in real time, to make spontaneous choices, and to allow for a broader focus, is critical. I think that the technological advances to support these changes are happening in perfect timing. Playing from digital scores is just easy, convenient, and aesthetically lovely. My only problem is that my kids believe that the iPad belongs to them, and I’ve had a reminder about expiring credits for one of their games pop up on my screen in the middle of a concert!”

You can see Downes’s attitude – and iPad – in action twice this weekend. On Saturday, April 13 at 7:30pm, Classic Pianos hosts Downes’ new Steinway-label debut recording “Exiles‘ Café.” A cozy cheese, pastry and wine reception follows. Then on Sunday, April 14 at 4 pm, Reed College presents Downes’ “Between Two Worlds: Music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold.” The concert features a conversation with Kathrin Korngold Hubbard, Korngold’s granddaughter. John Hubbard, the husband of Korngold’s granddaughter, joins Downes on cello.

The connections Downes creates between classical music and the modern world promote necessary discussions. Downes’ CD cover for her “Exiles’ Cafe” sparked intense debate on classical music authority Greg Sandow’s blog; the stodgies and the modern art lovers went head-to-head on defining authentic, appealing artistry. Downes jumps right into these conversations and disarms everyone with her honesty and wit.

Exploring Exiles

Downes’ relevance to 21st-century audiences stems not just from her authentic use of the common technological language, but also from her thoughtful pianism, so evident in her most recent album “Exiles’ Café.” The problem of exile spans centuries, and on the CD, which explores lesser-known works by composers like Chopin, Milhaud, Bartok, and Weill who were forced to leave their homeland and wander the world, Downes provides fresh insights by including works by contemporary composers. “I think that for me, especially, because at heart I’m a storyteller through my music, my work with composers helps me to bring musical narratives to life in very wonderful ways. ‘Exiles’ has brought me into a great friendship with the very young composer Mohammed Fairouz, who is doing absolutely extraordinary things, and we’re working together now on several commissioning projects.”

Downes’s contemporary approach to classical music extends beyond performing and commissioning new music, and using modern means to bring it to listeners. She’s also finding new ways to reach new audiences for her music. Downes recently created a new series in San Francisco called The Artist Sessions at Yoshi’s that enables dialogue between audiences and musicians who are on the cutting-edge of creating and performing compelling, classical music. “It’s another way for artists to take charge of the future and to contribute what we’ve learned as performers to the design of programming, the influencing of tastes and trends, and the development of new audiences,” she says.

That take-charge attitude is why Downes, like the exiled composers she admires, has been able to convert challenges – in her case, the changes rocking the classical music field – into opportunities, and explains her gratitude at having entered the field at the outset of a new era. “My teachers watched the structures they knew and relied on fall apart, in terms of government support for the arts, the recording industry, the dwindling (or changing, as I prefer to see it) audience for concert music,” she recalls. “Their doom and gloom informed us early on that if we wanted to make a life in music, we would have to actually make one, not just wait for one to happen. So we are out there on the front lines, directing our own projects, creating our own concert series and festivals, producing our own recordings, forming collaborations, and most of all making an audience for what we do. I think that, despite the challenges, this is right and good.”

Space is limited for Lara Downes’s “Exiles’ Café” concert on Saturday, April 13 at Classic Pianos, 3003 SE Milwaukie Ave. Portland, OR 97202. Reserve tickets by contacting Peggie Zackery at 503.546.5622 or peggie@classicportland.com; tickets are $15 adults, $10 students.

The all-Korngold concert on Sunday, April 14, is at Eliot Hall Chapel, Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR 97202. Tickets are $15, in advance or at the door. However, anyone can get a ticket for $8 by following Downes on all her social media accounts: Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Bring your smartphone with you the day of the concert to get this discount.