What Critics Say About Invitation to the Dance
..."I dance at the piano," states this young Jamaican/American pianist in the very artful liner notes, which include extensive material about her and this selection of dance transcriptions of diverse flavor and history. Trained from age five at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she went on to complete advanced studies under Hans Graf at the Vienna Hochschule and Rudolph Buchbinder at the Academy of Music in Basel. Thereafter she made impressive debuts in London, Vienna, and New York, and has since been concertizing in the US and abroad. Her wide range of artistic and interdisciplinary interests, which include jazz, ethnic, and contemporary music, is apparent in her keen sensitivity to the time, place, and intent of each composer. For example, in Weber's Invitation to the Dance Downes quite wonderfully reflects an awareness not only of the propriety of the occasion - a gentleman's invitation to a young girl for a formal dance, probably her first - but also of the girl's fluttery, hesitant acceptance. Downes tastefully underplays this, maintaining a certain restraint despite a keen light-footedness throughout to give a Jane Austen-esque reading: charming, slightly heady, but entirely contained. Downes keeps you firmly in the 19th century.
Ginastera's first piano work, Argentine Dances, op. 2 (1937), literally burgeons with what would become his unique brew of polytonality, folk idioms, and vital Latin rhythms. In these three pieces Downes allows herself more dynamic freedom and a certain emotive abandon; she knows how to milk the sweetness from dissonant chords, but she's quite at home in the barroom, thank you, and can handle any cowboy with her high-booted virtuosity and gaucho swagger. Here is technique so good you're not even aware of it - I kept imagining what Bob Fosse would do with these pieces - and yet she never flaunts it, never gets in the way of the music. You're only aware that you want to move...
...In Chopin's obscure little Bolero, probably written as a salon amusement, we find all the hallmarks of instantaneous combustion at the keyboard: long passages of Chopin's inimitable runs, sparkling trills, ever-changing harmonies and rollicking, idiomatic rhythms. But for all the brilliant passagework, he keeps slipping irresistibly into his instinctive polonaise form. Downes plays this wonderfully, with just the right sensibility, never trying to make it more than it is - a delightful oddity by a genius, a party trick.
Samuel Barber's Souvenirs was written originally as a series of duets to play with a friend. Hearing them, Lincoln Kirstein suggested he orchestrate them for a ballet: "Picture a divertissement in a setting of the Palm Court of the Hotel Plaza in New York, about the year 1914, the epoch of the first tangos," he suggested. In these pieces, Downes really comes into her own, her musical instincts perfectly in tune with the composer's. She puts us instantly into a faded ballroom, amid dancers who've seen too much of life, and wear too much rouge and hair tonic to hide it. The considerable technical demands find her a full match in her edgy sense of rhythm and her flair for the sonorities of the writing. The playing is very body-centered and distinctly dancerly - she is not only playing it but feeling it, and the effect is visceral. Balanchine lurks in every phrase.
The packaging of this disc is unusual and most appealing, with a large, fold-out note including exquisite art photos of the artist, fascinating background and comments from and about her, and wonderful notes by Harris Goldsmith. No, pure classical-lovers will most likely not be interested in this, but as a classical crossover conception this is beautifully presented and played. A delightful teaser to those whose interest in serious music is light but open to more; the presentation, the playing, and the superb notes make for a definite "invitation" to dance further.
--Lynnda Greene, Fanfare Magazine - November/December 2000
ARKADIA JAZZ