Conrad Tao, piano

Conrad Tao has appeared worldwide as a pianist and composer, performing to universal acclaim from critics and audiences alike. His accolades and awards include being a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, a YoungArts gold medal-winner in music, a Gilmore Young Artist, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant-winner.

Tao’s career as composer has garnered eight consecutive ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and the Carlos Surinach Prize from BMI. In the 2013–14 season, while serving as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s artist-in-residence, Tao premiered his orchestral composition, The world is very different now, commissioned in observance of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In September 2015, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia premiered his piano concerto An Adjustment, with Tao at the piano.

Tao’s 2017–18 season included his Lincoln Center debut with a solo recital including a work by American composer Jason Eckardt, a residency with the Utah Symphony performing both Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 “Age of Anxiety” and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and debut engagements with the Atlanta Symphony, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the Seattle Symphony. Tao performed in his own recital and had a new work composed for Paul Huang and Orion Weiss performed at the Washington Performing Arts Society, and opened the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra’s season with the world premiere of a new commissioned work, Over. Additionally, a new multimedia work, Ceremony, developed with vocalist Charmaine Lee, will receive its premiere at Brooklyn’s Roulette.

Tao is a Warner Classics recording artist, and his first two albums Voyages and Pictures have been praised by NPR, The New York Times, The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, and many more.