Tickets

$35 General Admission

$25 Seniors (55+), Military (active & retired), Glassboro Residents, Rowan Alumni, Rowan Employees, Accessible Seating

$10 Youth (18 and under)

FREE for Rowan students (ticket required)

*This is an assigned seating event

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About Lara Downes

Recently honored as Classical Woman of the Year by NPR’s Performance Today, American pianist Lara Downes has been called “a musical ray of hope” by NBC News, and “a trailblazing pianist who combines exquisite musicality with an acute awareness of how an artist can make a positive and lasting social impact” by Piano Magazine. She seeks inspiration from the legacies of history, family, and collective memory, creating performances and recording projects that serve as gathering spaces for her listeners to find common ground and shared experience. Besides her visibility as a performer and Billboard chart-topping recording artist, Downes is the creator and host of the popular NPR show AMPLIFY with Lara Downes and boasts 100,000-plus weekly listeners to her nationally syndicated radio programs. In the words of American conductor JoAnn Falletta, “Lara Downes is a perfect artist for our time, a champion of new and neglected music, an extraordinary communicator, a passionate advocate for our art form.”

A sought-after piano soloist, Downes has performed with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, Louisville, and Indianapolis; and had recitals and residencies at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Big Ears festival, Disney Hall, Ravinia, Tanglewood, the Gilmore Festival, Carolina Performing Arts, Washington Performing Arts, and Cal Performances. Her creative collaborations embrace an eclectic range of artists including musical polymath Rhiannon Giddens, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove, Broadway legend Brian Stokes Mitchell, author John McWhorter, the Miró Quartet, and violinists Tessa Lark and Daniel Hope. She has also enjoyed close partnerships with a host of prominent genre- and generation-spanning composers, including Valerie Coleman, Arturo O'Farrill, Christopher Tin, Billy Childs, Paola Prestini, Adolphus Hailstork, Clarice Assad, and many others.

As a recording artist, Downes’s uniquely insightful approach to concept and curation has resulted in an acclaimed series of chart-topping releases on the Pentatone, Sony Masterworks, and Rising Sun labels. Her latest, This Land, was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, in The Wall Street Journal, and in Downbeat Magazine; her 2023 release, Love at Last, was featured as an NPR Tiny Desk Concert; and America Again, selected by NPR as one of "10 Albums that Saved 2016,” was hailed by the Boston Globe as “a balm for a country riven by disunion.”

AMPLIFY with Lara Downes, the NPR Music series now in its fourth season that the pianist created and hosts, features intimate, profoundly personal video conversations with the visionary artists and cultural leaders who are shaping the creative present and future. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sphinx Venture Fund, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others.

Downes’s fierce commitment to activism and advocacy has led to her role as an Artist Ambassador for Headcount, a non-partisan organization that uses the power of music to register voters and promote participation in democracy.

About Rhiannon Giddens

Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time GRAMMY Award-winning singer and multi-instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, Pulitzer Prize winner, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.

Giddens has released three albums under her own name and two in collaboration with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, all on Nonesuch Records. American Railroad, her first album in collaboration with the Silkroad Ensemble, was released in November 2024, and her most recent album, a collaboration with Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, released in April 2025.

A founding member of the landmark Black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the all-female banjo supergroup, Our Native Daughters, Giddens is as much a curator as a creator. She is the current Artistic Director of the Yo-Yo Ma-founded Silkroad Ensemble, hosts a TV show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, and has hosted two podcasts (Aria Code from New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR, which ran for three seasons, and American Railroad from Silkroad). Giddens has published two children's books and written and performed music for the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption II, one of the best-selling video games of all time. She was a music consultant for 2025’s landmark film Sinners, and appeared as a recurring cast member on ABC's hit drama Nashville and as a music history expert on Ken Burns’ Country Music series on PBS.

As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”

About the Marie Rader Series

The Marie Rader Series (MRS) at Rowan University is a curated performing arts series that uplifts the region’s cultural landscape. Focused on artistic integrity and inclusion, MRS provides public offerings that reflect the innovation and quality consistent with Rowan University’s overall standards of high achievement and transformation, while providing unprecedented access for the community. 

Because of the Marie Rader Series, you don't have to travel to New York or Philadelphia to see some of the most influential leaders in dance, music, theatre and beyond. This series is also designed to introduce you to artists you wouldn't otherwise encounter-- artists who reflect not only the future of performing arts, but who help us envision a better world, right now, right here in South Jersey.

The Marie Rader is made possible in part through generous support from the Henry M. Rowan Family Foundation via the Marie Rader Memorial Fund and through funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

If you enjoy a Marie Rader experience, please support the series by spreading the word, and if you have the means, we welcome your financial support as well.

THANK YOU.

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