"Conrad Tao is always doing something. A couple years ago, I was blown away by the New York City pianist's curated program at SF Symphony's experimental sensation Soundbox. Intense on the keys, the young player's adventurousness in his music was almost scandalous. (We ended up raving all night together at F8 afterwards, during which I might have been a bit gushy.) Seeing him recently on NPR's Tiny Desk busting the ivories with tap dancer Caleb Teicher was a real treat,"
"I was being asked if I had any sort of Rachmaninoff-centered program that we could present in 2023, which was the big 150th anniversary of his birth. I said to my manager, I'm not sure if this is right for me-I love Rachmaninoff, but I haven't really played much of his solo piano music. I wanted to do something different if I was going to put something together."
Conrad Tao is an adventurous New York City pianist known for innovative programming and collaborations, including experimental Soundbox performances, an NPR Tiny Desk with tap dancer Caleb Teicher, and recitals drawing on avant-garde poetry. Tao assembled a San Francisco Performances program tracing Sergei Rachmaninoff's influence on 20th-century popular music, demonstrating how Rachmaninoff themes appear in compositions by Billy Strayhorn, Stephen Sondheim, and Harold Arlen and in renditions by Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and Celine Dion. The program was conceived around Rachmaninoff's 150th birth anniversary and intentionally avoids standard solo Rachmaninoff recital formats in favor of a thematic pop-classical pairing.
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