Pianist and passionate advocate for social justice Lara Downes closed Newport Classical Summer Festival in grand style with selections from her new album “This Land” (available August 23rd) and from her other recordings, repertoire, and projects.
Opening with a Jeremy Siskind arrangement of a 19th-century American folksong “900 Miles,” Downes described her program as “America in search of its roots”. She gave rich voice to the lyric pentatonic melody; with its occasional dissonance, it’s an integral part of the “American experience”.
A more substantial set From the Southland by Harry Thacker Burleigh followed. Though Burleigh was a Northerner, he was deeply conscious of his ancestral roots, and having met with Dvořák, became more keenly interested in exploring and preserving that part of our American folk heritage. Dedicated to his friend the English pianist and composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, From the Southland comprises a series of sketches each prefaced by lines of poetry penned by his wife Louise Alston Burleigh. Some of the early examples contain folk songs while the later ones took root in the spirituals. Burleigh wove them together into an attractive classically styled suite for piano.
Syrian American composer Kian Ravaei set variations to Woodie Guthrie’s response to the Great Depression, “This Land Is Your Land.” Each variation expressed the iconic and familiar tune in a different aesthetic, encompassing humor, dissonance, innocence, dream-like mists, ending in uncertainty as if questioning. Lara Downes’s own arrangement of “Shenandoah” followed.
Margaret Bonds’s based her three-movement Spiritual Suite on three spirituals: The Valley of the Bones based on “Dry Bones,” “The Bells: based on “Peter, Go Ring dem Bells,” and “Troubled Waters” based on “Wade in the Water.” Downes serenaded us with beautiful tone and sense of line, though at times the pedal proved overwhelming in the resonant hall, especially in the bass registers.
The second half commenced with a suite of Joplin rags, which Downes weaved into a story of the composer which she narrated before playing. The set included the moving prelude from the opera Tremonisha, which was never performed during the composer’s lifetime, “Magnetic Rag,” the composer’s last, “The Chrysanthemum” and “Bethena Waltz,” both written for his wife, the first on the occasion of their wedding, and the second mourning her death a scant three months later, closing with his “Maple Leaf Rag,” possibly his first though not published until later in 1899. Downes’s interpretation reveled in sensitive tone and delicious syncopated rhythms, but again the pedal occasionally overpowered.
Florence Price’s Piano Sonata in E Minor, of which we heard only the first movement, found Downes to be a noble interpreter; it concluded with a grand gesture. Paul Simon’s “America” in an exquisite arrangement by Noah Luna, and Amy Beach’s ethereal and quiet Under the Skies came to us with lovely quietude. Downes’s vision of America, her mission and work with youth, her compelling stories as well as her music, her podcasts, albums, and all things Lara Downes can be found on her website HERE.