Tao seeks but does not always find in curious, Debussy-centered recital

Sat Feb 01, 2025 at 2:03 pm
Conrad Tao played a recital on piano and Lumatone Friday night at Zankel Hall. Photo: Fadi Kheir

Conrad Tao is one of the most compelling musicians on the classical scene. A talented pianist and composer, he also has the creative restlessness that is vital to classical music, a combination of curiosity for what lies at the edges of the tradition, and a desire to not just improve his technique but learn new ways to play and make music.

All that was at the core of his Friday evening recital in Zankel Hall. He played one of the central works in the piano repertoire, the complete Etudes by Debussy, with Books I and II bookending the program. In between he played his own compositions and arrangements, and improvised—a skill he has been developing the past few years. And he did not just play piano, but the Lumatone.

The Lumatone is a new instrument. It’s an electric keyboard that uses the MIDI protocol to trigger sounds from, for example, a synthesizer. No ordinary keyboard, it has 280 hexagonal keys that can display myriad colors and that can be used not just to play electronic sounds but programmed in any tuning. It has also has the expressive capability to alter pitch and timbre after a note is struck, more like a woodwind or string instrument than a keyboard.

This was a new thing for one familiar with Tao’s playing. The other new thing was how wildly uneven the concert was, with some great heights but also some enormous flaws, most of them centered around the Lumatone.

The Etudes were the pinnacle of the evening, fascinating performances that showed a musician thinking both deeply and personally about the music. Book I was inelegant in an unusual way. That is no criticism but rather a description of his approach, which had a dry and brittle feeling to it. He gave an edge to everything, pressing past the humor of “Pour les cinq doigts” to get at the avant-garde heart of the music. Debussy made these pieces as monumental challenges to piano technique and also to musical form. Tao played them with what felt like the organic and appropriate idea of attacking the details of each small musical unit and letting the force and energy of that build into the form for each Etude.

With Tao’s superb pianism, this was exciting, and the overall sonic effect of some of the etudes, like “Pour les quatres,” was enthralling. In “Pour les octaves,” he did something subtle and difficult one had not heard before, ghosting certain individual notes in the rapid passages in the way a jazz saxophonist does, the bare outline of articulation of the pitch marking a rhythmic emphasis that sounded lighter than a feather but had the force of a sledgehammer.

At the close of the concert, Book II was very different. In a sense, this was the classic approach to Debussy, with more resonance and lush color. But it was fundamentally a different expressive approach, and that drove Tao’s technique. The repetitions of Etude 9 and the crashing chords of Etudes 10 and 12 seemed to spell out an expressive, rather than technical drama, Debussy and Tao having things to say about human experience beyond just what can be done at the keyboard. Whatever unsettled edge Tao had set up with Book I, he resolved technically and emotionally with Book II.

In between, there was more fine music-making and also things that did not work. After Book I, Tao switched to the Lumatone, which he had programmed to divide an octave into 53 notes, and paired with a jangly, electric harpsichord sound. To end the first half, he played an improvisation and then an original composition titled Playing in C, which sounded like a continuation of the improvisation.

The single most difficult and important thing when improvising is to know when to stop, to hear when an improvisation has reached a natural, logical ending. Improvising that cannot fill its duration with capable material squanders itself. This was the trap Tao fell into in both halves of the concert.

There was plenty of charm in hearing this instrument in the first improvisation, and though Tao did very little with the possibilities of microtonality, he did construct a lovely, consonant ending. Playing in C, however, went on far, far too long and even though it was composed, had little to say musically other than repeat. It was, amazingly for this musician, boring.

The second half began again at the piano, with Tao playing his transcription of Art Tatum’s take on “Over the Rainbow,” and there was an inventive, gorgeous, scintillating arrangement of Schumann’s “Auf einer Berg” on the Lumatone, the occasional microtone adding piquant expression to the music. In between these, Tao played his own piece Keyed In on the piano. This had a relation to the Etudes in that it was an attempt to conjure a liminal melody out of the technical possibilities of the piano. What this meant was an obsessive and long pounding at the piano, waiting for the overtones to turn into something. This didn’t work in the moment, and Tao weakened the piece by having a second, contrasting section that undermined the first.

After the excellent Book II, Tao returned for an encore, back at the Lumatone. Seemingly composed but untitled and feeling mostly unprepared, he played repetitive chords and sang wordlessly, and there was no discernible point nor much pleasure. A strange end to a weird night.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Carter, Beethoven, Bach, Ives, and more 3 p.m. May 4 carnegiehall.org


One Response to “Tao seeks but does not always find in curious, Debussy-centered recital”

  1. Posted Feb 01, 2025 at 5:54 pm by Ira

    I was at last nights performance and couldn’t agree more with this review. Excellent summary. One other somewhat weird element of the concert with the transcription of the Art Tatum solo improvisation of Over the Rainbow. When I listened to Tatum I realized that part of the pleasure of jazz improve is the slight pauses and hesitations as the musician makes his musical decisions. When the improv is transcribed I find it deadens the energy of the jazz.

    Jeremy Denk is a recent performance played a transcription of what sounded like an improvisation by Ethan Ivanson. It too lacked a certain energy for similar reasons. I applaud Tao’s efforts to “cross over” to other
    genres, though I’m not so sure it works unless there is some strong connection to the collection of pieces performed.

    Thanks for another fine and honest review on this website.

Leave a Comment









Subscribe

 Subscribe via RSS