Pianist Conrad Tao playing the lumatone | Photo: Fadi Kheir
By Asa Page
Carnegie Hall,
New York City
Beginning and ending his keyboard series at the esteemed Carnegie Hall with Debussy’s complete piano Etudes, Conrad Tao showed himself to be a consummate artist who has mastered his instrument to the point of appearing one with it. It could just as easily be said that the piano was playing him. He played with his whole body and soul, alternately attacking or caressing the pedals and keys wherever called for, expressing himself with a dynamic range that only a concert hall, and no recording, can really do justice. This display of technical prowess was so clear and complete that one could not help but watch Tao with rapt silence.
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But between the first and second half of the piano etudes, Conrad Tao introduced the audience to the Lumatone, a keyboard instrument that looks more like a MIDI controller from outer space than a piano and allows for new possibilities for microtonal music, with 280 hexagonal keys, which programmed with 53 tones per octave for Tao’s performance that included an original composition, Playing in C. The sound the Lumatone produces is anything but classical, as evidenced by the audience reactions of some of Carnegie Hall’s well-to-do and aging crowd: there was noticeably more shifting in seats, more scratching of heads, more interjection of coughing than during the Debussy Etudes. There seemed to be a palpable anxiety, a lurking question of why this world class pianist would spend an apparently significant amount of his time toying with an instrument that produces sonic arrangements so strange we have not yet learned how to hear them as music.
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To this reviewer, for whom the Lumatone pieces were the dark and distant star of the show, the answer is simple: we must imagine a future—maybe many hundreds of years from now—where the composers supposed now to be the pinnacles of classical music could be considered as we now consider the composers of Gregorian chant, that is, groundbreaking geniuses in their own eras, but relatively simple when compared to the work of later innovators. Tao himself seemed to invoke such a promising future before performing his Lumatone arrangement of Schumann’s “Auf einer Berg,” saying he recognized upon first hearing it that Schumann was a composer “centuries ahead of his time.”
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In a review of a performance from a world-class pianist who has obviously spent years studying the classics to the point of perfection, this idea of a future in which the gleam of the classics begins to fade sounds like heresy, I know, but that is exactly the point: the Debussy Etudes are more or less solved. One can certainly envision other master pianists playing them differently than Tao, but one can scarcely imagine anyone playing them better. The Lumatone, on the other hand, represents a brave new world, making music like we might hear if we could tune into a radio station beamed to Earth from somewhere in the Andromeda system. If the piano represents the epitome of the western musical tradition attempting to mirror nature, this instrument sounds more like singing through the sonic equivalent of a kaleidoscope. When Tao plays it, he transforms from master into experimenter, boldly going into an uncharted realm where his exploratory compositions test the edges of intelligibility. Listening with a beginner’s mind, one hears new harmonies, discovering previously unheard of patterns, new layers, consonances and dissonances, new clashing and interplay of sound waveform trajectories. It makes one ask whether a melody could not just a tune but a tapestry.
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Returning to the piano in the second half, Conrad Tao performed the piece he says led him to the Lumatone, an original piano composition entitled Keyed In, explaining beforehand that it represented his intention to compose in an exploratory, unconventional way, following the resonance of the piano itself instead of a melodic line. Tao ultimately realized that intention, and his achievement with this piece was truly remarkable. It involved him pounding deliberate chords up and down the keyboard, insistent and dramatic, but never haphazard. This produced layers of sound reverberating and oscillating throughout the whole wood frame of the piano—a quality almost like the sound produced by playing the rim of a crystal glass—pushing the instrument to its very limits until one almost feared it might shatter.
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The night also included Conrad Tao performing a jazzy and moving transcription of Art Tatum’s “Over the Rainbow” and closed with an encore back at the Lumatone to perform a work in progress, inviting the audience to join in as he added his voice in a near shout above the keyboard’s droning chords. The message was clear: Conrad Tao is an artist with something to say, an artist who plays and composes from a primal energy, a fire in his belly. His career in and beyond the world of classical music is far from over, and we’ll be watching his continued progress at the edge of our seats. 
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