Knoxville Symphony Orchestra

Formally established in 1935, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra is the oldest continually performing symphony orchestra in the Southeast, reaching over 200,000 people annually. Now, over 80 years later, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra continues to develop and sustain a symphony orchestra of the highest artistic standards and to reach all of East Tennessee audiences with excellent musical performance and education programs.

Honored as 2022 Classical Woman of the Year by Performance Today, American pianist Lara Downes has been called “a musical ray of hope” by NBC News and “an explorer whose imagination is fired by bringing notice to the underrepresented and forgotten” (The Log Journal). An iconoclast and trailblazer, her dynamic work as a sought–after soloist, a Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, a producer, curator, arts activist, and advocate positions her as a cultural visionary on the national arts scene. Lara’s musical roadmap seeks inspiration from the legacies of history, family, and collective memory, excavating a broad landscape of music to create a series of acclaimed performance and recording projects that serve as gathering spaces for her listeners to find common ground and shared experience.

In February 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York City, capturing the exuberant essence of what the composer called “a musical kaleidoscope of America—our vast melting pot…” 100 years later, iconoclastic American pianist Lara Downes reimagines Gershwin’s masterpiece to reflect on a century of immigration and transformation, commissioning a radical new arrangement by the Puerto Rican composer Edmar Colón that reverberates with the multicultural, kaleidoscopic sounds of America in our own time.

Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith) is ostensibly a concerto for saxophone and orchestra, but in many ways, it is an anti-concerto. Concertos are usually showcases for dazzling displays of virtuosic technique. This work requires a great deal of technique, but of a much more subtle variety.  Instead of rapid-fire outbursts of sixteenth or thirty- second notes the soloist and orchestra are asked to play at the glacial tempo of thirty-six quarter notes per minute. The dynamics are extremely quiet. It is more about introversion than extroversion. The players and the listeners need to settle in for twenty minutes as the work unfolds slowly and quietly with beautiful, sustained harmonies and only slightly less sustained melodies introduced via the orchestra or intermittently by the saxophone soloist. This stately but understated work is a welcome respite from the chaos and intrusiveness of modern life. In 2024, this work earned Sorey a Pulitzer Prize in Music.