Go way back, back to Bach’s era, when music students were typically taught an instrument and to write music at the same time. That was normal. Even a century ago, Rachmaninoff would dazzle at the keyboard, and his thunderous piano concertos remain box-office favorites. In pop and almost all other music, composer-performers are of course the norm. But in our age of hyper-specialization in concert hall music, the hybrid has become rare.
Just 27, pianist-composer Conrad Tao is among the brightest lights in the old tradition. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra will give the world premiere of his Violin Concerto in concerts Friday and Saturday, with the composer’s frequent collaborator (and another regular Atlanta guest), violinist Stefan Jackiw, as soloist. The conductor, Robert Spano, now carries the title of ASO “co-artistic advisor.” Tao will sit with the audience and listen.
“Yeah, I’m a bit of a show pony,” the composer says, speaking on a recent Zoom call, along with Jackiw. “I have a real curiosity of getting a story across to an audience, somehow.”
As performers, the collaboration started several years ago when Jackiw (pronounced jah-KEEF) and cellist Jay Campbell were discreetly fishing around for a pianist to form a trio. They knew of Tao’s reputation, and without calling it an “audition,” scheduled a get-together, which happened in Tao’s NYC apartment. Instant chemistry. The Junction Trio, a riff off their initials, JCT, was soon performing widely.
Digging inside the new concerto
That Tao would write a concerto for Jackiw seemed inevitable. They spend a lot of time together on tour with the trio. While waiting in airports and on long car trips, they’d talked about a major new work. “I was dreaming up a lot of different pieces in my head,” Tao says. “Ultimately it came down to thinking what I wanted to hear from Stefan. That’s always motivated me, knowing [his] playing as well as I do, what can I get that I don’t usually hear, aspects of his playing that I want to get inside of.” (Disclosure: In a past job, I hired both Tao and Jackiw to perform as concerto soloists with an orchestra.)
Tao’s new violin concerto is outwardly traditional, in three movements, with the soloist at times soaring above or embedded within the orchestral textures. But there are few interpretive descriptors in the score, and only the middle movement has an actual title, “Song.”
But what does the music sound like? “There’s a lot of humor, in the outer movements, and Conrad describes parts of it as the violin surfing through the orchestra,” Jackiw said. “As a violinist, structure isn’t the first thing I’m drawn to. But I was struck by how structurally rigorous it is, especially the first movement. Once that’s pointed out to me, as a performer, that makes the work easier to digest.”
In considering Tao’s development as a composer, Jackiw notes he was struck by how different this work is from the Piano Trio he wrote in 2019 for The Junction Trio. There are shared elements, but Jackiw says the Piano Trio is about something. It’s not a narrative, but there’s an inspiration behind it.
The ASO program
True to form, each work on Spano’s program complements the others. After the premiere of Tao’s Violin Concerto and after intermission, the great Atlanta composer Alvin Singleton is heard with “Different River,” an ASO commission from 2012, described as “a single-movement work that follows the ebbs and flows encountered on the journey of life.”
The concert opens and closes with Richard Strauss tone poems about two unsavory characters: “Don Juan” is the start. At the end comes “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” where the hero is a trickster from German folklore.
CONCERT PREVIEW
Stefan Jackiw performing Conrad Tao at the ASO. 8 p.m. Sept. 17-18. $30-$99. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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