What is American music? A classical piano album is predisposed to inspire contemplation, but the perspective that Lara Downes brings to her work focuses on specific questions about what it means to be American. On her latest album This Land, by reinterpreting and reimagining “American” music such as Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Paul Simon’s “America,” Downes uses her skill and platform as one of classical music’s most respected pianists to question colonialist and white Eurocentric ideas about America from within its own canon.
As a specific example, “Variations on This Land Is Your Land” takes the cheerful self-assuredness of the original tune and churns it into a complex, dissonant, and delicate meditation on whose land we live on, and what it means to tell and re-tell that story. Frequently collaborating with local ensembles SFCM Orchestra and the SF Ballet Orchestra, Downes is a Bay Area treasure, nationally renowned via her active performing career and as the host of NPR’s AMPLIFY with Lara Downes. This Land is out now via Pentatone.
