America In Pursuit Featuring Lara Downes

Recently honored as Classical Woman of the Year by NPR’s Performance Today, American pianist Lara Downes has been called “a musical ray of hope” by NBC News, and “a trailblazing pianist who combines exquisite musicality with an acute awareness of how an artist can make a positive and lasting social impact” by Piano Magazine. She seeks inspiration from the legacies of history, family, and collective memory, creating performances and recording projects that serve as gathering spaces for her listeners to find common ground and shared experience. Besides her visibility as a performer and Billboard chart-topping recording artist, Downes is the creator and host of the popular NPR show AMPLIFY with Lara Downes and boasts 100,000-plus weekly listeners to her nationally syndicated radio programs. In the words of American conductor JoAnn Falletta, “Lara Downes is a perfect artist for our time, a champion of new and neglected music, an extraordinary communicator, a passionate advocate for our art form.”

A sought-after piano soloist, Downes has performed with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, Louisville, and Indianapolis; and had recitals and residencies at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Big Ears festival, Disney Hall, Ravinia, Tanglewood, the Gilmore Festival, Carolina Performing Arts, Washington Performing Arts, and Cal Performances. Her creative collaborations embrace an eclectic range of artists including musical polymath Rhiannon Giddens, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove, Broadway legend Brian Stokes Mitchell, author John McWhorter, the Miró Quartet, and violinists Tessa Lark and Daniel Hope. She has also enjoyed close partnerships with a host of prominent genre- and generation-spanning composers, including Valerie Coleman, Arturo O'Farrill, Christopher Tin, Billy Childs, Paola Prestini, Adolphus Hailstork, Clarice Assad, and many others.

As a recording artist, Downes’s uniquely insightful approach to concept and curation has resulted in an acclaimed series of chart-topping releases on the Pentatone, Sony Masterworks, and Rising Sun labels. Her latest, This Land, was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, in The Wall Street Journal, and in Downbeat Magazine; her 2023 release, Love at Last, was featured as an NPR Tiny Desk Concert; and America Again, selected by NPR as one of "10 Albums that Saved 2016,” was hailed by the Boston Globe as “a balm for a country riven by disunion.”

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