Hailed by renowned music critic Harris Goldsmith as "the most exciting prodigy to ever come my way" (Musical America), 14-year-old American pianist Conrad Tao showed an interest in music at a very early age, when he was found playing children’s songs on the piano at about 18 months of age. Conrad was born in Urbana, Illinois, started violin lessons at age 3 and formal piano lessons at 3 ½, gave his first public piano recital at age 4, and performed a recital at the World Piano Pedagogy Conference in Orlando, Florida at age 7. At age 8, he made his concerto debut with the Utah Chamber Music Festival Orchestra performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major, K414.
At age 10, Conrad was featured on the national radio program “From the Top” as both pianist and composer, and he was featured again on PBS’s “From the Top - Live from Carnegie Hall” TV series in 2007 as violinist, pianist and composer. Conrad’s recital at Juilliard’s Paul Hall in 2006 has been featured on National Public Radio’s “Performance Today”. Conrad is the winner of Juilliard Pre-College’s Gina Bachauer Piano Competition and the Prokofiev Concerto Competition in 2006. In 2008, Conrad was named a Davidson Fellow Laureate by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.
Past concerto performances include those with the Aspen Festival Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, the California Symphony, the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra, the Miami International Piano Festival Orchestra, the Orlando Philharmonic, the Pennsylvania Sinfonia, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach, the Columbus ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, among others. He has also given solo recitals in the Juilliard’s Paul Hall, the Rockefeller University in New York City, Chicago’s Music in the Loft concert series, the Lincoln Theater in Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale's Broward Center for the Performing Arts, and made his debut in Italy last summer, resulting in an immediate return engagement in December.
Highlights of the past summer season include recital debuts at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland and the Festival Internacional de Piano “Blanco y Negro” in Mexico City, Mexico, a pre-concert recital at the Mostly Mozart Festival in Avery Fisher Hall in New York, and concerto performances with the Napa Valley and San Francisco symphonies. In May, Conrad toured China with the Juilliard Orchestra, performing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 under the baton of Xian Zhang in Beijing, Suzhou, and Shanghai.
In his upcoming seasons, Conrad will be making debuts with the Symphony of the Americas as both violin and piano soloist, the Lexington Philharmonic, Santa Fe Pro Musica, and the Fort Worth Symphony under Miguel Harth-Bedoya, as well as return engagements with the Columbus ProMusica Chamber Orchestra and the California Symphony. He also makes recital debuts at the Harriman-Jewell Concert Series in Kansas City, UC Berkeley’s Cal Performance Series, Ravinia Festival in Chicago, and the Louvre in France, among others.
As an accomplished composer, Conrad has won national prizes since the age of 7 and his compositions have been featured on Chicago WFMT radio’s 50th anniversary program and the national radio program “From the Top.” At age 10, his piano composition, Silhouettes and Shadows, won the BMI Carlos Surinach Prize as the youngest winner of BMI’s prestigious award for young composers in the Western Hemisphere. Conrad is a five-time consecutive winner of the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer award since 2004 and his composition, Sonata for Two Pianos, was featured at the 2004 award ceremony and performed at the Aspen Music Festival in 2005. He has given two composition recitals in New York City featuring eleven of his original compositions. In February 2007, two new compositions, Duet for Erhu and Violin, a commissioned work by the Art Institute of Chicago, and Two Worlds for string quartet, had their world premiere at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Midwest Meets East concert. His first piano concerto, The Four Elements for Piano and Orchestra, was commissioned by the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio and premiered in October 2007.
As an award-winning violinist, Conrad won the 2003 Walgreens National Concerto Competition, which led to the performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor with the Midwest Young Artists Concert Orchestra at age 8. This past January, he performed both the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor and the Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor at the same concert with the Miami Piano Festival Orchestra at Boca Raton and Naples, Florida. He was a recipient of violins from the Stradivari Society for three years. Conrad is currently playing an 1899 Giulio de Gani violin, on loan to The Juilliard School from Carol Wipf, on loan to him from the Juilliard Rare Instrument Collection.
Conrad is currently enrolled in Juilliard’s Pre-College Division studying piano with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky and violin with Ms. Catherine Cho. He studies composition privately with Mr. Christopher Theofanidis in New York City. A former student at the Music Institute of Chicago, Conrad studied piano with Mr. Emilio del Rosario, violin with Ms. Desiree Ruhstrat and composition with Mr. Matthew Hagle. Conrad currently resides in New York City with his parents and sister.
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