Lara Downes: Artist Bios

Lara Downes

Steinway Concert Artist Lara Downes has attracted attention as one of the most exciting and communicative young pianists of today's generation, cited by critics for her "breathtaking virtuosity" and called "a most delightful artist, with a unique blend of musicianship and showmanship" by National Public Radio. Lara has won over audiences at the world's most prestigious concert venues, including Queen Elizabeth Hall London, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center.  Recent appearances have included concerts at the Kennedy Center, San Francisco Performances, the University of Vermont Lane Series, the American Academy in Rome, the El Paso Pro Musica Festival, and the Montreal Chamber Music Festival. She is currently Artist in Residence at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis, where she is the host and co-curator of the Studio Classics series.

Lara's chamber music appearances include collaborations with the Alexander String Quartet, the Miami String Quartet, cellist Zuill Bailey, violinists Rachel Barton Pine, Lara St. John, and Nicholas Kitchen. Commissions and premieres of new works for Lara include composers Aaron Jay Kernis, David Sanford, Benny Golson, Dan Coleman, Jonathan Russell, and Laurie San Martin. Lara has been heard on NPR's Performance Today, WNYC's New Sounds, and WBGO's Jazz Set, and she will be featured in an upcoming documentary produced by WQXR.

Lara's busy performance career is strongly impacted by her commitment to expanding and developing new audiences for the arts.  She is the Founder and President of the 88 KEYS® Foundation, a non-profit organization that fosters opportunities for music experiences and learning in America's public schools by providing pianos and music education programming in K-12 classrooms.  Lara is also the Founder and Artistic Director of the Rising Stars of California program, a statewide initiative that showcases California’s most gifted young musicians in mainstage concerts and community outreach performances.

In addition to the excitement Lara brings to the concert stage, her commercial recordings have been met with tremendous critical and popular acclaim. Her debut CD, Invitation to the Dance, was called “a magical little recording” by NPR, and her CD American Ballads was ranked by Amazon.com among the four best recordings of American music ever made. Lara Downes is a Steinway Artist.

David Sanford

David Sanford credits a variety of influences with igniting his musicianship. "I started on trombone when I was about ten and liked big band music early. I wanted to be a jazz musician. Charles Mingus inspired me to be a composer later on." Sanford was also influenced by rhythm and blues/funk groups like Parliament, the Isley Brothers, and Sly and the Family Stone and, later, by orchestral and more mainstream popular music. After completing undergraduate music studies at the University of Northern Colorado, he earned a master's degree in theory and composition from the New England Conservatory of Music and an M.F.A. and Ph.D. at Princeton University.

Sanford has won many awards and honors, including a BMI Student Composer Award, a Koussevitzky Commission and a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to take a year off to focus exclusively on composing during graduate school. Recently, Sanford won the Samuel Barber Rome Prize Fellowship, allowing him to stay at the American Academy in Rome for 11 months with a group of 25 to 30 scholars in other areas of the humanities. One of the referees for his work wrote: "David Sanford is the real thing, a composer in the American tradition of brash, open-eared exploration: no material is too exalted or too debased for him to transform into his living art."

Sanford's works have been performed by the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Chicago Symphony Chamber Players, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Harlem Festival Orchestra, cellist Matt Haimovitz, the Corvini e Iodice Roma Jazz Ensemble, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, the Empyrean Ensemble at UC Davis, Mount Holyoke faculty members Linda Laderach, Adrianne Greenbaum, and Larry Schipull, and dozens of other groups and performers. In addition, he has conducted performances of his own works at Monadnock Music, New England Conservatory, the Knitting Factory, and the Five Colleges New Music Festival, and leads his own big band, the Pittsburgh Collective.