Conrad Tao, Piano

Friday, March 25, 2016 | 8:00 pm

Conrad Tao began his musical career as a wunderkind. As a pre-teenager he appeared as both a violin and piano soloist with dozens of top-tier orchestras, and later received eight consecutive ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. Now twenty-one, he has transitioned gracefully into a mature artist with interpretive depth well beyond his years. The Baltimore Sun declares, “Tao possesses startling technical élan and an ability to communicate clearly, no matter how thorny a score may become.”

At Duke Performances, Tao plays a varied program of old favorites and new discoveries. The first half is anchored by American works: excerpts from North American Ballads by the iconoclastic contemporary composer Frederic Rzewski sit on either side of Copland’s Piano Sonata. In the second half, Tao takes on Cage a new commission from Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Lang, followed by Schumann’s Carnaval, each movement of which represents a different festal reveler.

Program