Lara Downes, Davóne Tines & Titus Underwood
Biography Lara Downes, Davóne Tines & Titus Underwood
Lara Downes
American pianist Lara Downes has been called “a delightful artist with a unique blend of musicianship and showmanship” by NPR, and praised by the Washington Post for her stunning performances “rendered with drama and nuance”. Known for her eclectic presentations of the piano repertoire – from iconic favorites to newly-commissioned works – her solo performances bridge musical genres and traditions, and engage a wide range of audiences with what San Francisco Classical Voice has called “an elegant example of how accessibility and a breezy relevance can exist, organically, in a classical music concert.’
Born in San Francisco and raised in Europe, Downes’ musical outlook reflects the diversity of her personal heritage and extensive travels. Her interest in connecting music to a wide and inclusive breadth of human experience mines her own mixed African American and Eastern European background and the impressions of her transatlantic adventures to produce a unique range of creative projects, from an exploration of the music of Jewish composers in exile to a centenary tribute to Billie Holiday, from an intimate portrait of the marriage of Robert and Clara Schumann to a sweeping look at the musical breakthroughs of the American 20th Century, all captured with timeless relevance and a deeply personal style that the Huffington Post has called “addicting – Downes plays with an open, honest heart.”
Downes’ European training under Hans Graf and Rudolph Buchbinder led to early debuts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall London, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Salle Gaveau Paris, and has won over audiences at diverse venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to Le Poisson Rouge and Classical Revolution. Recent performances include the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Bargemusic, San Francisco Performances, Maverick Concerts, the Montreal Chamber Music Festival, Portland Piano International and the University of Washington World Series, among many others. Her musical collaborations include diverse partnerships with artists including cellist Zuill Bailey, violinist Rachel Barton Pine, the Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet, the Musical Art Quintet, composers David Sanford, Benny Golson, Daniel Felsenfeld, Mohammed Fairouz and Daniel Bernard Roumain, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove. Her original solo performance projects have received support from prominent organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Cultural Innovation and American Public Media.
Lara’s solo recordings have met tremendous critical and popular acclaim. Exiles’ Café (Steinway & Sons, 2013) topped the bestseller charts and was called “ravishing” by Fanfare magazine. Some Other Time (Steinway & Sons, 2014), a duo recording with cellist Zuill Bailey, debuted in the Billboard Top 10 and was called “luscious, moody and dreamy” by the The New York Times. Her recent chart-topping release, A Billie Holiday Songbook, has been embraced by both jazz and classical critics and listeners, called “possibly the most intriguing Holiday tribute” of this centenary year by Jazz Weekly.
Lara’s live performances and recordings are heard regularly on national radio programs with features including NPR Music, Marketplace, Performance Today, Sirius XM Symphony Hall, WNYC’s New Sounds, and WFMT’s Impromptu. She is the producer and host of The Green Room, a radio show about the lives of classical musicians, distributed nationally by the WFMT Network. Her writing has been published in Listen Magazine, The Rumpus, Arts Journal and San Francisco Classical Voice. She is the founder and director of The Artist Sessions, a pop-up concert series featuring international soloists and ensembles at the forward edges of classical music.
Lara serves as Artist in Residence at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, UC Davis where she mentors the next generation of young musicians as Director of the Mondavi Center National Young Artists Program. She is the Founder and President of the 88 KEYS Foundation, supporting arts education experiences in California public schools through instrument donations and teaching artist presentations.
Lara Downes is a Steinway Concert and Recording Artist.
Titus Underwood
is Principal Oboe of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Prior to Nashville Symphony Orchestra, he was Acting Associate Principal of Utah Symphony. He received his Master of Music from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Elaine Douvas, and additional studies with Nathan Hughes and Pedro Diaz. He earned his Bachelor of Music at the Cleveland Institute of Music as a pupil of John Mack, legendary principal oboist of the Cleveland Orchestra. There he also studied with Frank Rosenwein and Jeffrey Rathbun. In 2013, he received his artist diploma from The Colburn School with Allan Vogel. Additional teachers include Anne Marie Gabriele, Robert Atherholt, and Joseph Robinson. Mr. Underwood has performed as guest principal of Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Miami Symphony Orchestra, and Florida Orchestra. Also, he has played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony, Puerto Rico Symphony, and San Diego Symphony. Mr. Underwood has also played principal in Chineke!, Gateways Music Festival, and Bellingham Festival of Music.
Davóne Tines
Heralded as “a singer of immense power and fervor” by The Los Angeles Times, Davóne Tines came to international attention during the 2015-16 in breakout performances at the Dutch National Opera premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars and at the Ojai Music Festival presenting works by Caroline Shaw and Kaija Saariaho with the Calder Quartet and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Highlights of the present season include the European premiere of David Lang’s prisoner of the state with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Symphony, Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri with Louis Langrée and the Cincinnati Symphony, John Adams’ El Niño with David Robertson and the Houston Symphony, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Stéphane Denève and the Saint Louis Symphony. Davóne Tines appears throughout the season on numerous concert stages in collaboration with The Dover Quartet and is presented by Carnegie Hall, Celebrity Series of Boston, Da Camera Society of Houston, and Vocal Arts DC in his first American recital tour with pianist Adam Nielsen.
Davóne Tines was co-creator with Zack Winokur and composer Michael Schachter, as well as co-librettist of The Black Clown, a music theater experience inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem of the same name that animates a black man’s resilience against America’s legacy of oppression by fusing vaudeville, opera, jazz, and spirituals to bring Hughes’ verse to life onstage. The world premiere was given by the American Repertory Theater in 2018 and presented by Lincoln Center in summer 2019. In his review of The Black Clown, Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote, “this rich, seamless production melds the past and present of African-American history into an electrifyingly ambivalent whole…An estimable opera singer, Mr. Tines has a depths-plumbing bass-baritone that can find a range of contradictions within a single note. And his body and face match that voice in their expressiveness.”
As a founding core member of the American Modern Opera Company, Davóne Tines has been featured in a wide array of productions including Henze’s El Cimarrón and John Adams’ Nativity Reconsidered, both presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the original work Were You There with music by Matthew Aucoin and Michael Schachter.
In summer 2019, Davóne Tines made his Opera Theatre of Saint Louis debut in the world premiere of Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’ Fire Shut Up In My Bones based on the memoir of the American journalist, commentator, and New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow. John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West was the platform for Davóne Tines’ San Francisco Opera debut, and the work was later given its European premiere by Dutch National Opera. He has appeared at the Opéra national de Paris, Teatro Real, and Finnish National Opera in Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars; and made his Brooklyn Academy of Music debut in Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing in a production by multi Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus. Additional highlights include a new production of Oedipus Rex at Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de São Carlos led by Leo Hussain, and Handel’s rarely staged serenata, Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo at National Sawdust in a new production by Christopher Alden that examined parallels between an 18th century telling of Ovid’s mythological tale and our own contemporary aesthetic driven by power, class, race, and the cruelty of thwarted desire.
Davóne Tines’ concert appearances include performances of John Adams’ El Niño with Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Royal Swedish Orchestra, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony and with Pablo Res Broseta and the Seattle Symphony, and a program exposing the Music of Resistance by George Crumb, Julius Eastman, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Caroline Shaw with conductor Christian Reif and members of the San Francisco Symphony at SoundBox.
Davóne Tines is a winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, recognizing extraordinary classical musicians of color who, early in their career, demonstrate artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and an ongoing commitment to leadership and their communities. He also is the recipient of the 2018 Emerging Artists Award given by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and is a graduate of Harvard University and The Juilliard School.
