Young American will release ‘Voyages’, his debut full-length album in June

On June 11th, 2013, Conrad will celebrate his nineteenth birthday by kicking off the UNPLAY Festival, a three-day event conceived and curated by the pianist/composer. He will also release his debut full-length album on EMI Classics, entitled Voyages, featuring works by Ravel, Rachmaninov and Meredith Monk, as well as Conrad’s own compositions vestiges, for solo piano, and iridescence, for piano and iPad.

The three intimate evenings of the UNPLAY Festival (June 11-13, Purchase Tickets Here), held in Brooklyn’s powerHouse arena, will broadly examine the musician’s changing role in contemporary culture. Themes will include the ephemeral nature of performance, the places where the past and the present collide and conflict, and the historical narratives surrounding classical music (including which works are considered “standard repertoire” and why). Performers will include Conrad himself, Face the Music, Iktus Percussion, Sideband, thingNY, Todd Reynolds and more.

Voyages, Conrad’s full-length debut album on EMI Classics (Pre-Order Here) continues to develop the festival’s themes of change and progression, examining the shifting and unpredictable nature of movement in our lives. Says Conrad: “whether it be the surreal dream images of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit or my own vestiges, the restless motion of Meredith Monk’s Railroad (Travel Song), or the various moods of Rachmaninov’s preludes, the most interesting transformations of our lives come about not so much in getting from point A to point B, but rather in what happens between the two points.”

The UNPLAY Festival is made possible, in part, by Conrad Tao’s Gilmore Young Artist Award and Avery Fisher Career Grant.

“Aspen did not give Conrad Tao the inclination to be an uncommonly curious and adventurous musician. By the age of 5, living in Illinois and years before he even knew of Aspen, Tao was playing both piano and violin and composing scores, beginning with his own rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

But Aspen has been the environment where Tao has felt supported and encouraged to pursue his wide range of interests. Tao spent six summers at the Aspen Music School, and the lasting impression of his Aspen experience was that it was OK to let one’s creative mind drift.”

You can read the full article here.

Two Avery Fisher Career Grants Awarded for 2012

On May 22nd at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts,

Nathan Leventhal, the Program’s Chairman, Charles Avery Fisher and Nancy Fisher

announced two 2012 Avery Fisher Career Grant recipients:

 Benjamin Beilman, violinist and Conrad Tao, pianist

The Avery Fisher Artist Program, established by the late Avery Fisher as part of a major gift to Lincoln Center in 1974, serves as a monument to Mr. Fisher’s philanthropy and love of music, with the Career Grants in particular exemplifying his devotion to helping young artists. Since the first Career Grants were given in 1976, 123 have been awarded (including this year’s grants), and all recipients are currently working musicians. Identified early in their careers, among former Career Grant recipients are violinists Augustin Hadelich and Hilary Hahn, pianist Kirill Gerstein and the Miró Quartet.

Festivities were held at Lincoln Center’s Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse for an invited audience. This year’s announcement, made by the Program’s Chairman Nathan Leventhal, along with Charles Avery Fisher and Nancy Fisher (children of the late Avery and Janet Fisher), and performances by the two recipients were recorded for broadcast by Classical 105.9 FM ~ WQXR, with host Robert Sherman, to be aired on Wednesday, May 30, from 9 – 10 pm. The 2012 awards mark the 33^rd time WQXR has broadcast these festivities, having been a broadcast partner since the first Career Grants were awarded in 1976. WNET Thirteen will also be featuring the 2012 recipients on its NYC-ARTS program.

For information about the Program (Avery Fisher Prize and Career Grants), please visit the Avery Fisher Artist Program website, which is accessible online through www.About.LincolnCenter.org, where it listed under Programs, or alternately at www.averyfisherartistprogram.org. Links to today’s 2012 Career Grant performances, as well as performances of select past recipients, are also available on this website.

 Avery Fisher Career Grants of the Avery Fisher Artist Program are designed to give professional assistance and recognition to talented instrumentalists, as well as chamber ensembles, who the Recommendation Board and Executive Committee of the Avery Fisher Artist Program believe to have great potential for major careers. Each recipient receives an award stipend of $25,000, to be used for specific needs in furthering a career. Recognizing the need for video in a young career, the Avery Fisher Artist Program, with the aid of Live From Lincoln Center’s Executive Producer John Goberman, provides recipients with an unrestricted DVD of the day’s performance to aid them in publicizing their work.

Up to five Avery Fisher Career Grants may be given each year and recipients must be U.S. citizens or permanent U.S. residents. Recipients are nominated by the Program’s Recommendation Board, which comprises nationally known instrumentalists, conductors, composers, music educators, managers and presenters. Final selections are made by the Executive Committee, whose members are: Emanuel Ax, pianist; David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; Henry Fogel, Dean, Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University; Anthony Fogg, Artistic Administrator, Boston Symphony Orchestra; Pamela Frank, violinist; Ara Guzelimian, Provost and Dean, The Juilliard School; Nathan Leventhal, Chairman, Avery Fisher Artist Program; Reynold Levy, President, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Yo-Yo Ma, cellist; Zarin Mehta, President and Executive Director, New York Philharmonic; Jane S. Moss, Vice President, Programming, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Joseph W. Polisi, President, The Juilliard School; Chad Smith, Vice President, Artistic Programming, Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Matías Tarnopolsky, Director, Cal Performances, UC Berkeley. Charles Avery Fisher and Nancy Fisher are advisors to the Executive Committee. The Program periodically also awards the Avery Fisher Prize. The Avery Fisher Artist Program is grateful to Lincoln Center, Inc. and its president Reynold Levy for continued support.

M.L. FALCONE, Public Relations
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Conrad is the 2011 Soloist-Prize winner of Germany’s Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern!!! “34 young soloists and 10 ensembles applied to the 35 “Junge Elite”-concerts in 2011 to win one of the wanted junior-prizes from Festspiele MV. Two of these prizes were given to two talented young Americans. The soloist-prize was given to the American pianist Conrad Tao on a piano evening in Stolpe…The 5000 euro soloist-prize is awarded since 1995 and is donated by WEMAG AG since 2008.” You can read the full press release here.

“Tao [is] naturally gregarious, curious, and smart. He’s also a composer. On his debut recording, just out on EMI via iTunes, he plays his confidently poetic Three Songs, which hold their own with a pair of Debussy preludes and Stravinsky’s Three Movements From “Petrushka.” Already, he’s moving into more ambitious compositional forms. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra recently asked him to write an orchestral piece commemorating the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

 “Conrad is the kind of musician who is shaping the future of music,” says the pianist Christopher O’Riley, who plays arrangements of Radiohead in his recitals and who hosts the PBS television program about child musicians, From the Top. “These kids have a set of experimental listening habits, and they’re starting to pursue distinctive styles that they’re passionate about.” Tao’s tastes range widely—he’s enthusiastic about John Adams and Björk, he’s turned me on to the eclectic lo-fi band tUnE-yArDs, and I’m still making my way through the reviews he posts on Tiny Mix Tapes. (He likes Of Montreal’s Paralytic Stalks, especially its “gloriously unhinged finale.”) That curiosity should keep him from getting corralled into the all-Chopin zone.”

You can read the full article here.

Conrad’s first commercially available recording, released by EMI Classics, is now available for purchase on iTunes. His installation in The Juilliard Sessions consists of works by Debussy, Stravinsky, and himself.

View it in the iTunes store here.

Conrad’s performance with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, hailed as “a blazing debut” by The Detroit News, has been posted in its entirety on the DSO’s YouTube channel. Watch it below:

Conrad Tao has been commissioned by the Dallas Symphony and Jaap van Zweden to write the official piece to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s assassination.  Quite an honour for someone whose (Chinese) parents were not even born at the time, but the decision was unanimous after Conrad’s mesmerizing success there last May…

[via IMG Artists]

…Needless to say, Tao does not have an average college student’s life. Often, he said, juggling his schoolwork and performing career can be “incredibly frustrating,” especially since he does most of his schoolwork on the road. Having completed his high school studies entirely through independent study without tutors or teachers, Tao said that he is quite used to getting by on his own. But Tao maintains that getting a well-rounded education is incredibly important for him as a musician.

Conrad was profiled in the Columbia Spectator on January 19, 2012. You can read the full article here.