Lara's new album Exiles' Café (Steinway & Sons #30016) features the 2nd Piano Sonata of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, best known as the one of the founders of film music through his award-winning scores to such cinema classics as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Seahawk (1940). Korngold composed his Piano Sonata No. 2 in E major, Op. 2, in 1910 when he was a13 year old prodigy in Vienna. It was premiered the following year in Berlin by Artur Schnabel, who continued to champion the work. Written in the floridly emotional style of the Viennese fin de siècle, the work is in four large movements, all of which demand a virtuoso technique from the pianist.

A forgotten gem, the Sonata is given a profound reading by Downes, who is also joined on this special program by Portland resident Kathrin Korngold Hubbard, the composer’s granddaughter, to share memories and insights about Korngold’s life and work, and the role of escape and exile in her family’s history.

In Korngold Hubbard's words: “In 1938, having established himself as an Academy Award-winning composer, Korngold was invited to compose the score for a film called The Adventures of Robin Hood. On February 12th, the Korngolds, now in California, received a phone call from home warning them that it was “all over” in Vienna. They never returned. Korngold went on to earn his second Oscar for The Adventures of Robin Hood, the film to which we all owe our very existence.”

The evening will also feature readings of Korngold’s Romance Impromptu and Tanzlied des Pierrot from the opera Die tote Stadt, for cello and piano, performed by Downes with cellist John Hubbard, husband of Ms. Korngold Hubbard.