Miró Quartet Collaborates with Lara Downes for "Here on Earth" Project Featuring Diverse Musical Depictions
The Miró Quartet is embarking on a new performance and recording project with Lara Downes. The program called Here on Earth features musical depictions of planet earth, its evolution, and its inhabitants, with works spanning two centuries of cultural shift that center around Darius Milhaud's 1923 work La Création du Monde, performed here in Milhaud’s own arrangement for piano and string quartet.
Additional repertoire will explore various aspects of the natural world and our place in it. For example, The River by Billy Childs is an ode to the composer’s love of nature. Jake Heggie’s Earthrise is inspired by the iconic photograph of Earth taken from the surface of the moon during the Apollo 8 landing in 1968. Other works by living composers Clarice Assad and Stephen Banks, as well as Margaret Bonds, Florence Price, Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven round out the program.
The Miró Quartet is one of America’s most celebrated and dedicated string quartets, having been labeled by The New Yorker as “furiously committed” and noted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer for its “exceptional tonal focus and interpretive intensity.” For over twenty-five years the Quartet has performed throughout the world on the most prestigious concert stages, earning accolades from critics and audiences alike. Based in Austin, TX, and thriving on the area’s storied music scene, the Miró takes pride in finding new ways to communicate with audiences of all backgrounds while cultivating the longstanding tradition of chamber music.
Recently honored as Classical Woman of the Year by NPR’s Performance Today, American pianist (and NY Times crossword clue) Lara Downes has been called “a musical ray of hope” by NBC News, “a classical music instigator pushing the music forward with great gusto” by the NY Amsterdam News, and “an explorer whose imagination is fired by bringing notice to the underrepresented and forgotten” by The Log Journal.
Jake Heggie: Earthrise
Contact Us
We invite you to contact us now about finding a date to bring Here on Earth to your series in the 2024/25 season.