Conrad Tao recalls how crucial Chicago has been to his musical evolution

Pianist Conrad Tao will be a familiar face in Orchestra Hall this spring, performing Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis (April 30-May 3) before returning for a Symphony Center Presents Piano recital on June 7.

For his solo recital, which is part of Symphony Center’s monthlong exploration of American music, Tao will pair early 20th-century American music with works by European composers who either emigrated to the United States or were influenced by its music. In this way, the program shares a connection with the Bartók concerto, which was composed in the United States during the final months of the Hungarian composer’s life.

Born in Urbana, Illinois, and raised in Naperville and New York City, Tao long has demonstrated an affinity for American repertoire, from popular favorites to topical modern works. Gershwin has been part of his professional repertoire since his teens, and his 2023 CSO subscription debut featured the composer’s Piano Concerto in F. In 2019, Tao recorded works by Frederic Rzewski, Julia Wolfe and Aaron Copland in a Warner Classics album titled “American Rage,” which reflected on tense periods of U.S. history, from labor disputes in the 1930s to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

For his June recital, Tao homes in on the early 20th century to explore a “cloud of associations” among the musical styles of this period, including jazz, theatrical and cinematic music. Selections from Gershwin’s songbook and Tao’s own arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue bookend the program, which also features Irving Berlin’s All By Myself, Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow, Billy Strayhorn’s Chelsea Bridge and Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag. These works are interspersed with music by European composers such as Debussy, Korngold, Rachmaninov, Ravel and Schoenberg. Tao, who is a composer as well as an arranger, also performs his own Improvisation on Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

While choosing this repertoire, “I was thinking about all of the composers who ended up in the United States in the 20th century, and the kinds of connections that happened in this country, musically, that really shaped American musical identity, or at least certain facets of it,” Tao said in a recent interview.

For example, Austrians Schoenberg and Korngold both ended up in Los Angeles; the former taught at UCLA and the latter became a prolific Hollywood composer. Tao also noted that Gershwin became “tennis buddies” with Schoenberg toward the ends of their lives. “A lot of American music, especially American songwriting and popular music and jazz, and then this midcentury, cinematic aesthetic, these are wrapped up in a history of European émigrés into the U.S. in the early 20th century. And, of course, they’re drawing from Black vernacular traditions,” Tao said.

Joplin’s popular Maple Leaf Rag, composed in 1899, is the earliest work on the program, and Tao follows it with Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, Op. 33b, written about three decades later. “Purely from a musical perspective, I love hearing Schoenberg, especially Schoenberg’s piano works, alongside more vernacular or dancehall-type music, because I feel like a lot of Schoenberg actually sounds so great if I imagine it in a smoky nightclub,” said Tao.

He also noted that Gershwin spent time with Ravel in Harlem jazz clubs when the French composer visited New York, and Russian-born composer Rachmaninov — who became a U.S. citizen and spent his final years in California — once heard the African American jazz pianist Art Tatum perform. These connections mutually influenced both American and European music. “American pop music harmony doesn’t really exist without Ravel,” Tao said. As for Rachmaninov, “Especially in his later work, I believe you can really explicitly hear the influence of American jazz on him.”

For his April and May concerts with the CSO, Tao turns to the music of another European composer who became an American citizen. While Rachmaninov had emigrated in 1918 after the Russian Revolution, Bartók moved to the United States in 1940, due to his opposition to the Nazi regime and Hungary’s alliance with the Axis powers. He wrote his Third Piano Concerto in 1945, while suffering from an ultimately fatal case of leukemia, and dedicated the piece to his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory-Bartók. The concerto is one of Bartók’s more lyrical, almost neoclassical works, in contrast to the percussive, dissonant style of his modernist compositions.

“I love the emotional tenor of it. It reminds me of Mozart in the way that there is this kind of emotional ambiguity,” Tao said of the Third Piano Concerto. The piece is “suffused with all this love,” but also has wistful, mysterious and heartbreaking qualities. Underneath its “charming, beautiful, glittering surface,” there’s also a “more complex emotional universe,” he said.

Tao looks forward to returning to Chicago as both orchestral soloist and recitalist this spring. He fondly recalls attending CSO subscription concerts, sometimes wearing a child-size tuxedo, when he lived in Naperville from the ages of 5 to 9. These years were also pivotal in his musical education. Attending both the Music Institute of Chicago and the Midwest Young Artists Conservatory, he studied piano with Emilio del Rosario, violin with Desirée Ruhstrat and composition and music theory with Matthew Hagle.

“Looking back, I’m just so delighted that this was where I got my musical start, because Chicago has such amazing musicians, it’s such a high level of musicianship, but there was also just an intimacy and a calmness to it,” said Tao. “The Music Institute, while being a place where you were getting such a fabulous education, also felt like — and was, and is — a community music school.”

His first CSO subscription concert performances in 2023 were “so meaningful to me,” Tao said. “Just because I am so focused on the work, I sometimes forget to really feel how special some of the things I get to experience are. And I did not feel that way in Chicago. I did not struggle at all to really feel how magical [it was], and I felt so lucky. I felt so emotional, honestly. So, I’m so happy to be back in two capacities at Orchestra Hall.”