Ravinia 2023 Issue 5

With her most recent Ravinia appearance, in 2021, Lara Downes put special focus on music of the Great Migration and the Chicago Black Renaissance, which spanned the 1930s and ’40s, building on her then recently established Rising Sun Music recordings. She was joined by Chicagoans cellist Ifetayo Ali-Landing (above, right) and violinist Rachel Barton Pine, who has been similarly devoted to expanded recording and publishing of music by underrepresented composers for more than 20 years, as well as members of the inclusion-focused Chicago Sinfonietta. Sharing the composers’ stories during the concert, Downes and company performed several works by Margaret Bonds, Florence Price, and other musicians with deep ties to Chicago, including Nora Holt, Lil Hardin Armstrong, and Sam Cooke. PATRICK GIPSON/RAVINIA “We are always talking about put- ting something together, ‘Let’s do this piece.’ I know her mind is on making sure that these are all recorded at some point, and we’re working together on that. I’m always happy to be along for the ride in the Lara Downes world. She’s been a great friend and influence.” HOW DID DOWNES originally become involved with tracking down music by forgotten Black composers? “I first came across music of Flor- ence Price almost 20 years ago,” says Downes. “There was one piece in this anthology called 100 Years of Piano Music by Black Women Composers that I found in a library. It was literally a very handmade but scholarly com- pilation. Her first Fantasie nègre was in that book; it completely bowled me over. Until then, I did not know such a sound: really lush, late-Romantic virtuoso writing that was using Black spirituals as source material. I started playing it and audiences had this incredible response. I’ve been playing that piece for years and recorded it on the America Again album.” The 2009 discovery of Price manu- scripts near Saint Anne, IL, became a game-changer. “There had been a news story about the couple that found all this stuff in an attic,” Downes recalls. “Alex Ross wrote about this in The New Yorker , which is how a lot of people found out about it. This young couple bought a house that had been used as a summer house by Florence Price. And they found all these boxes in the attic which had literally been open to the elements: boxes of waterlogged, crumpled-up, rodent-infested manu- scripts. They did enough research to recognize her signature. All these box- es ended up archived at the University of Arkansas because she was original- ly from Little Rock. “I met with John Michael Cooper and we were just talking over dinner and I said, ‘There’s got to be so much more piano music in those boxes.’ He started looking through them and found dozens and dozens of piano pieces. I started learning them and recording them on the spot. That was exactly the same time that [the pub- lisher] Schirmer acquired her catalog from her estate. “He started editing these pieces and they were all published. It was one of the most meaningful and most expansive things that I’ve done as an RAVINIA MAGAZINE • AUGUST 15 – AUGUST 27, 2023 10