Steinway & Sons celebrates the release of Lara Downes Exiles’ Café on their eponymous record label by sending her on a "Steinway Tour" around the country. Downes will perform from Exiles’ Café at Steinway & Sons showrooms from New York to Vancouver, inviting audiences to step into the inspired world of this album. You’ll feel like a member of the Exiles’ club, joining the ranks of Chopin, Stravinsky, and Bartok, whose music Lara Downes flawlessly channels. This synergetic tour will shine the spotlight on both the pianist and the piano! Audiences at the dealerships and galleries in New York, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Northbrook, IL, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Coralville, IA, Rochester, NY, Buffalo and Toronto will be transported to another time and place, where smoky cafes were the backdrop to musical revelations. Downes fantasized about the “Exiles’ Café” after a moment of inspiration and created a narrative around it, which she describes as “both real and metaphorical.” This album captures the pain, nostalgia, and freedom that are indelibly tied to this state of being—in exile. Featuring miniature works by composers such as Chopin, Milhaud, Bartok, Weill, and including a premiere work by Mohammed Fairouz, Exiles’ Café goes beyond an examination of what it is to be in exile, to consider the inspiration exiled composers drew from the musical communities they found in their new homes. Because in this sense, the exiles cafes were actual places – there were indeed such locations throughout history to which composers and musicians gravitated and found each other, and they and their music were influenced accordingly. While listening to Lara Downes playing, one is almost transported back to these cafés, sitting with the composers and their circles, lamenting their homes now lost, celebrating their freedoms. On this tour, Downes recreates this atmosphere and provides the musical backdrop of this thematic tour.  This tour is the perfect vessel for this album—floating from one city to another, Lara will bring this nomadic essence for all to enjoy in the grand and beautiful Steinway & Sons stores. Lara will perform works new and old—Chopin’s Mazurka in F minor, Rachmaninov’s Preludes and Fragments, a tango by Stravinsky and Hungarian Dances by Bartok, a gorgeous tune by Kurt Weill and music from rising star Mohammed Fairouz. William Grant Still’s yearning piece “Africa” and Paul Bowles’ Preludes for Piano are also featured on the album. Lara Downes is herself no stranger to the nomadic life of the exile—she was born, of Caribbean and Russian heritage, in San Francisco and after studying with Maria Cisyk and Adolph Baller, she spent a decade traveling around Europe with her sisters, performing and studying in what she describes as a “gypsy-like existence.” Her teachers and mentors during these years included Hans Graf, Olivier Gardon and Rudolph Buchbinder. Lara made early debuts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall London, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Salle Gaveau Paris and has always been as happy performing in traditional venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center as at alternative spaces like Le Poisson Rouge and Classical Revolution. She has been acclaimed as one of the leading innovators in reinventing the chamber and solo piano show (benchmark successes have included “Long Time Coming” – a multimedia examination at the way Duke Ellington’s music gave hope to other musicians and to Depression-era America, and “Thirteen Ways of Looking At Goldberg” where twelve contemporary composers wrote their own Goldberg Variations to sit alongside one of Bach’s) and is heard regularly on national radio programs including NPR Music, APM’s Performance Today, WNYC’s New Sounds and WFMT’s Impromptu. Lara Downes is a Steinway Artist, Artist-In-Residence at UC Davis and has just been announced as Artistic Director of the performance series “The Artist Sessions” at the prestigious Yoshi’s Café venue in San Francisco.   Tour Dates w/RSVP information: Thursday, April 11 at 8 pm– Vancouver, BC at Tom Lee Music 929 Granville Street Vancouver BC V6Z 1L3 604.685.8471   irene.quan@tomleemusic.ca http://www.tomleemusic.ca/main/events.cfm?eid=1162   Friday, April 12 at 7 pm– Seattle, WA at Sherman Clay 1624 Fourth Avenue Seattle WA 90101 206.622.7580 Ben_Klinger@sclay.com www.shermanclay-seattle.com   Saturday, April 13 at 7 pm–Portland, OR at Classical Pianos 3003 SE Milwaukie Avenue Portland, OR 97202 Peggie Zackery - 503.546.5622  http://www.classicportland.com/ peggie@classicportland.com   Friday, April 26 at 7 pm—Northbrook, IL at Steinway Piano Gallery Chicago 141 Skokie Boulevard Northbrook, IL 60062 847.400.5500 http://www.steinwaychicago.com/   Sunday, April 28—Indianapolis, IN at Meridian Music 12725 Old Meridian Street Carmel, IN 46032 Craig Gigax  - 317.575.9588 gloria@meridianmusic.com http://www.meridianmusic.com/   Wednesday, May 1 at 7:30 pm—Des Moines, IA at West Music 3304 100th Street Urbandale, IA 50322 Ann Seebach -  800.407.4266 http://www.westmusic.com/locations/des-moines-piano-gallery aseebach@westmusic.com   Thursday, May 2 at 7:30 pm—Coralville, IA at West Music – Iowa City 1212 Fifth Street Coralville, IA 52241 Kirk Davis - 319.351.2000 x1226 http://www.westmusic.com/locations/coralville kdavis@westmusic.com   Wednesday, May 8 at 7pm—Rochester, NY at Denton Cottier & Daniels 349 W Commercial St East Rochester, NY 14445 585.586.3020 http://www.dentoncottieranddaniels.com/ gary@dcdpianos.com    Thursday, May 9—Buffalo, NY at Denton Cottier & Daniels 460 Dodge Road Getzville, NY 14068 716.689.6996 http://www.dentoncottieranddaniels.com/ michelle@dcdpianos.com   Friday, May 10 at 8 pm—Toronto, ON at Steinway Piano Gallery Toronto 2651 John St. - Unit #8 Markham, ON L3R 2W5 905.940.5397 http://www.steinwaypianogallery.ca/news/laradownes info@steinwaypianogallery.ca