It’s easy to forget, when talking to him about his String Quartet No. 2, his global career, the new-music festival he’s organizing this summer in Brooklyn or his incisive thoughts on contemporary concert culture, that Conrad Tao is only 18 years old.
But then again, he’s been a musician for virtually all of his short life. He was just 18 months old when his parents discovered him playing Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano at home in the university town of Urbana, Ill., and recorded it for posterity.
He was too young to remember it, but jokes that the VHS tapes of his first performance allow him to see proof that this piece of family lore was true.
“Now I can repeat this story with some confidence,” Tao said, speaking by phone last month from his home in Manhattan.
A frequent performer in South Florida, Tao returns to the state April 14-16 for a series of three concerts with Fort Lauderdale’s Symphony of the Americas in which he’ll play all five of the piano concertos of Beethoven: Nos. 1, 2 and 3 twice, and Nos. 4 and 5 once.
It’s an impressive stunt, but the concerts at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts offer audiences a chance to hear a remarkable young talent traverse a quintet of repertory pieces that chart the development of Beethoven’s artistic arc, from chip off the Mozart block to inhabitant of an innovative realm entirely of his own making.
The idea to do all five of the concerti came about in discussions with the orchestra’s director, James Brooks-Bruzzese, with whom Tao has collaborated for several years, beginning with concerts in 2009 in which Tao, also an accomplished violinist, played the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto on the first half and then switched to piano for the Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1 on the second half. (He played violin and piano most recently on a PBS special featuring the poperatic pre-teen Jackie Evancho.)
He said he’s happy to be working with the orchestra again, in part because of their adventurousness.
“There are very few groups that I would have the opportunity to do this with, to do all five Beethovens,” Tao said. “I know for certain that wouldn’t happen with other ensembles. I love working with these guys. I love working with James, because they’re willing to do this stuff.”
While the Beethoven concertos show the development of the composer’s style, Tao approaches them as separate works rather than trying to stress commonalities in pieces written over a 20-year period.
“Each one is beautifully contained, and each one has a specific and coherent identity itself,” he said. “Three, Four and Five especially are so individual, kind of shockingly so.”
The concertos have a good deal of very difficult virtuosic writing, a reminder that Beethoven was himself a celebrated virtuoso before his growing deafness cut that part of his career short. But the most difficult moment for Tao is a passage that’s technically within reach of amateur players: The opening bars of the Fourth Concerto (in G, Op. 58).
In a bold stroke unlike almost every other concerto written then or since, the work begins not with the orchestra, but the piano alone, playing a quiet little theme that, like much of Beethoven’s writing, is built of simple motifs out of which the composer erects complex structures. But that first piano entrance has to be just right, Tao said.
“It’s one of the most difficult beginnings, because it’s so exquisitely plain and it’s so transparent. And it’s obviously not about hitting the notes. It’s all about voicing them correctly, and having this sound, that if you look at it, the light is just hitting it perfectly. And that’s just so difficult,” he said.
And that concerto is his favorite of the five.
“Number Four, definitely,” he said. “And I really do hate to pick favorites. I appreciate Four partially because of the fascinating coloristic challenges it presents and the enormous range of colors that it encompasses, the structural experimentation of it … which was very revolutionary at the time of composition. All of these qualities make it such an amazing and magical piece.”
Tao has concertized all over the world and played with major American orchestras including the Philadelphia, Detroit, San Francisco, Dallas and Baltimore ensembles. He’ll be at the Aspen and Mostly Mozart festivals later this year, making a concerto debut at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and performing with the Hong Kong Philharmonic.
He’s won eight straight ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer awards for his music ― his own piano concerto, The Four Elements, was premiered in 2007, when Tao was 13 ― and has been commissioned by the Dallas Symphony to compose a piece marking the 50th anniversary in November of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“It’s very hard for me to talk about how my music sounds,” Tao said, noting that he’s realizing each day just how young he still is and that his personal style is very much a work in progress. “But what I would like to explore are some of the deeper philosophical underpinnings of writing instrumental music today. I think it’s interesting to think about what instrumental music can contribute, or music that we can sort of place within a classical framework (can contribute), and I think that’s due for a radical shift.
“I think it’s interesting to think what role that can play in a post-Internet age, and that’s a question I’m interested in answering both through composition and also in my work as a performer and programmer,” he said, adding that’s he’s started working more with electronics and improvisational approaches to his music.
Tao is a full-time joint-degree student at Columbia and Juilliard; at Columbia, he’s settled on a major in ethnicity and race studies. His parents, Sam and Mingfing, are Chinese immigrants and scientists; Sam is an engineer for communications giant Alcatel-Lucent, and Mingfing is a climate science researcher at Columbia.
Tao is very much aware of the millennial generation to which he belongs, and is excited about the possibilities of wrestling with the changing dynamic of concert culture. Young classical performers today are as likely to perform in places such as New York’s Joe’s Pub as they are in concert halls, and the possibilities are wide open not just to reach audiences, but to redefine the whole genre.
“I think that’s an important question to ask: As someone who is very, very passionate about the current day and is very committed, or tries to be committed, to a very avant-garde, progressive sensibility, where does playing Beethoven come in? Where does playing Chopin come in? Where does playing Ravel come in? What role does that have?” he said. “And I think that ultimately the interesting thing about it is the fact that we’re doing it … These pieces aren’t just established, they’re constantly being re-established. And we have that ability, to make sure it’s a re-establishing tradition rather than a staid, stagnant established tradition, because honestly, that’s pretty boring.”
Tao is himself something of a throwback to another tradition, the composer-performers of the 18th and 19th centuries – Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt among them – who were as well-known for their playing as they were their writing. Tao says he enjoys performing too much to concentrate solely on composition.
“I think the composer-performer is due for a renaissance,” he said. “I don’t love using the word ‘renaissance,’ because I think what’s more interesting is that composer-performers can create a new context for what they do rather than think about the old tradition of the composer-performer. But that being said, I think we can also say, ‘Let’s do this again, because it’s about time. It’s been a little too long.’”
Conrad Tao and the Symphony of the Americas perform the five piano concertos of Beethoven in three concerts April 14-16 at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. Concertos No. 1, 2 and 3 will be heard at 2 pm Sunday and 8:15 pm Monday. Concertos No. 4 and 5 are scheduled for 8:15 pm Tuesday. Tickets are $25-$75. Call 954-462-0222 or visit www.browardcenter.org.