Conrad Tao Alights in Carnegie Hall
Premier Keyboard Artist Performs Debussy and His Own Works
By: Susan Hall - Jan 30, 2025
Conrad Tao takes our inner ear on new journeys in a program at Carnegie Hall on January 31. The first notes we’ll hear are often said to be Claude Debussy making fun of Carl Czerny. Czerny’s exercises are of course where most of us begin our piano journeys. Thumping away at scales, we don’t learn to appreciate the sounds that can emerge from the instrument. We don’t coax. We hammer.
Tao is arguably the finest technician performing today. Technique is where he starts. He will deploy his pianistic prowess to explore music’s possibilities.
For the concert at Carnegie he will perform not only on the piano, but also on an instrument that supplements his exploration: the Lumatone. Gerard Grisey memorably suggested that we try to listen to spaces between notes on the twelve-tone scale. In the interstices, Grisey would find deliciously spectral tones we had not heard before.
The Lumatone is a keyboard instrument with 280 keys of different colors. On it, you can perform not only horizontally across the x axis, but on a y axis heading from bottom to top (or vice versa).
Tao proposes to perform an improvisation to introduce us to the instrument. He hopes that we will be ‘present’. He is not a synesthesiologist, but for audience members who are, this dashing instrument of tones and colors offers a novel experience.
Improv starts us off, but then we’ll have a Lumatone take on Somewhere Over the Rainbow, followed by a Schumann song, Auf Einer Burg, which has obsessed out-side-the box musicians for decades.
Tao is always generous and appreciative of his predecessors, like Matthew Smart who made Schumann's Auf Einer Burg part of a concert performed on Nigerian serrated Fanta bottles.
Will we hear the second book of Debussy Etudes differently after we're detoured and/or elevated by Tao on the Lumatone. Tao hopes so. Mostly he hopes listeners don't fall into hearing default mode and be deprived of the sensuous new sounds he may be able to prod from the instruments on which he will perform.
Zankel Hall, New York
January 31
Tickets here.