MA Top 30 Professional: Lara Downes

Journalist, Pianist, Creative Partner
National Public Radio
Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

Most people probably think of Lara Downes as a pianist and recording artist. Over the course of more than 20 years, she’s appeared just about everywhere and made more than a dozen recordings, each of them a highly creative program born of stylistic freedom and deep dives into history, politics, and culture.

Both featured soloist and collaborator, she is the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s (LACO) first-ever creative partner and has worked with other ensembles from the Miro Quartet to the Philadelphia Orchestra. She is especially known to espouse composers outside the mainstream and is a champion of Black and female composers.

Her landmark America Again recording, listed by NPR as one of the “10 Albums That Saved 2016,” pairs works by Florence Price and Amy Beach with Harold Arlen and Duke Ellington. Downes defined it as a “tribute to the generations of Americans who dream the impossible.”

“Everything I do stems from this fascination with the people behind the music,” she says. “My conviction is that they’re very important.” 

Such was the impetus behind her NPR video podcast, Amplify with Lara Downes, featuring in-depth conversations with such luminaries as Jon Batiste, Denyce Graves, Jonathan Heyward, and poet Aja Monet. Launched as a “lifeline” during the “desperate, scary, and sad” pandemic, the series has become a treasure-trove of voices both famous and little-known.

Downes’s most timely effort, still in development, may prove to be her master-stroke. Through “The Declaration Project,” with the LACO, Downes has commissioned composers Valerie Coleman, Arturo O’Farrill, and  Christopher Tin to each write a multimedia work for piano and orchestra based on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—the unalienable rights famously enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.

The LACO will perform the three pieces as a triptych at Lincoln Center in July 2026, on the occasion of the nation’s 250th birthday. In the meantime, Downes has created a “Declaration Playlist” and invited the public to submit essays, photos, other media around those rights as part of a national digital archive. 

The project is “meant to be an invitation to reflect on this moment, but the…primary goal is just to start conversations.”