Conrad Tao’s recital began with an improvisation and ended with a Beethoven piano sonata, taking in pieces by John Adams, Bach, Schumann and three contemporary US composers, including Tao himself, along the way. All were, Tao said, part of what he calls his “pandemic repertoire”, works he lived with during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and which he sometimes livestreamed from his New York apartment.
He’s certainly an interesting player, robust and full-blooded in his approach. That worked best in Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue BWV903, a piece freewheeling and sturdy enough to survive such a take-it-or-leave-it approach. Tao repeated the fugue as his encore, insisting that it had not gone as he had hoped first time around. But Schumann’s Kinderszenen fared much less well, losing much of its charm and intimacy under such full-on treatment, though the sheer quirkiness of the piano writing did come through, suggesting Tao could be well worth hearing in larger scale Schumann works. Beethoven’s A flat Sonata Op 110 was good in parts – the Adagio opening to its finale drew the evening’s only genuinely quiet playing, though the scherzo was driven rather too enthusiastically. And the final fugues did not unfold as naturally and consolingly as they can.
The opening improvisation, with magnets laid on the piano strings bringing out an extra layer of harmonics, had led straight into Adams’s early China Gates, gently tinkling and rather Terry Riley-like, while Tao’s own piece Keyed In (another lockdown product) was another, rather more explosive exploration of the piano’s overtone structure. A movement from Jason Eckardt’s ongoing Compendium of Catskill Native Botanicals was innocuous enough but Fred Hersch’s Schumann homage Pastorale was positively charming, with Tao integrating its improvised elements perfectly into the scheme.
