New Classical Tracks: Conrad Tao, 'Pictures'

Conrad Tao - Pictures (Warner Classics)

At age 21, pianist Conrad Tao has already racked up some pretty big honors, including the Gilmore Young Artist Award, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Conrad has shown promise as a composer as well, and two years ago was commissioned to compose a piece commemorating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That commission came from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, where Conrad is now serving as artist-in-residence.

Conrad Tao's latest musical adventure is Pictures, a recording featuring contemporary works — including one of his own — interwoven around Modest Mussorgksy's Pictures at an Exhibition. "This is a piece I've grown very close to over the last couple of years," Conrad says. "It's a piece that feels very personal, actually. It's heterogeneous, which I love. It traverses so much emotional and sonic terrain in 30 minutes."

The most honest pictures are those taken candidly. Conrad says the same is true with this collection of Pictures."I just kind of showed up at a studio and recorded it, and most of it is actually a live performance," he explains.

As it snowballed and started to turn into an album, Conrad started to look at the connecting threads of Mussorgsky's piece. "Pictures is a piece about memory and a reflection on loss, and it uses images to explore these themes," he says. "And that's what this album is about.

"We kick this off with 'Cage,' by David Lang from his Memory Pieces, which were published as a set in 1992," Conrad explains. "Each of the Memory Pieces is written in memory of a friend and colleague of David Lang's, and 'Cage' aims to capture sort of the mystery of John Cage's scores. It's really a piece kind of in stasis. For six minutes, it's just a tremolo between two notes. It's kind of hazy and it's kind of insistently unclear. And I love it as an opener for the album because it literally is sonically untethered, and I'd like to think that it kind of hopefully untethers an audience from any expectation they might have. It's a piece that really feels like it's already occupying a middle, uncomfortable space, which feels very accurate to the experience of grief and loss. You feel like you're living at the surface of your skin."

Conrad Tao's piece, "A Walk for Emilio," was inspired by the piano teacher with whom he studied as a child, Emilio del Rosario."We called him Mr. D," Conrad says. "He was my first piano teacher who really introduced me to anything you might call standard repertoire. He was wonderful, kind of like a grandfather figure."

Del Rosario died in 2010, leaving quite an impression on his young student. "A lot of stuff has just happened in my life as a musician since 2010, and especially when something big happens, I'll kind of entertain the thought, 'What would Mr. D say?'" Conrad says. "So this is a piece that sort of considers that weird contradictory feeling of even thinking about an imagined memory. There's grief and sadness but there's also anger and resentment in that, that you had this taken away.

"And then we have Pictures at an Exhibition, which is kind of the big exploration of loss through images," Conrad clarifies. "It's an astonishing piece, it really is. It's an amazing piece and I think it's a piece you can take for granted because it's familiar. It's a piece that exists in so many different forms and orchestrations. People have really explored the potential of this piece. The piano score is so unique and weird and moody. I find myself, when I'm playing it, reflecting on personal experience and sort of the various people I want to pay tribute to, the various people who've left us. And this piece is so heterogeneous sonically that it means you can really explore everything. You can explore all these little craggily crevasses of what loss feels like."

A reflection on memories, and loss. That's what brings meaning to pictures, and to the sonic terrain of this recording of the same name, with Conrad Tao.

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