Program Book - Conrad Tao

N INET Y-F I FTH SEASON Sunday, June 7, 2026, at 3:00

Conrad Tao Piano GERSHWIN

The Man I Love

SCHOENBERG

Klavierstück No. 1, Op. 33a

GERSHWIN

Clap Yo’ Hands

BERLIN

All by Myself (arr. Tao)

TAO Improvisation on Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody

on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, Variation 15

ARLEN

Over the Rainbow (arr. Tatum)

RACHMANINOV Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43,

Variation 15

STRAYHORN

Lush Life (arr. Tao)

JOPLIN

Maple Leaf Rag

SCHOENBERG

Klavierstück No. 2, Op. 33b

KORNGOLD

Randy and Drake from King’s Row

GERSHWIN

I Loves You, Porgy I Got Rhythm

INTERMISSION

DEBUSSY Pour les arpèges composés

from Etudes for Piano, Book 2

RAVEL STRAYHORN RAVEL RAVEL

Sonatine: Modéré Chelsea Bridge (arr. Tao) Sonatine: Mouvement de menuet Sonatine: Animé

GERSHWIN

Rhapsody in Blue (arr. Tao)

This performance is generously sponsored by Martha C. Nussbaum and Gerd Wichert.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.

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The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association thanks

Martha C. Nussbaum and Gerd Wichert

for generously sponsoring this performance.

CS O.O RG

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COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898–1937) once singled out “The Man I Love” as his personal favorite among his songs, but he could never figure out what to do with it. The song was originally written for the 1924 Lady, Be Good! starring Fred and Adele Astaire, the Gershwin brothers’ first Broadway musical, but it was cut during the Philadelphia tryout before the show opened in New York for a run of 330 performances; in 1926 the Astaires took Lady, Be Good! to London, where they rang up the curtain 326 more times. The Gershwins were unable to work “The Man I Love” into either Strike Up the Band in 1927 or Rosalie the following year, and they finally settled for publishing it separately. It was first taken up by jazz orchestras in London and Paris, and only became a hit in America in the mid-1930s, with recordings by the torch singer Helen Morgan (originator of the role of Julie in Kern and Hammerstein’s Showboat of 1927) and the Benny Goodman Quartet.

The most tangible recognition of the increasing prominence of ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951) in the musical milieu of the 1920s was his appointment to the faculty of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in 1925 to take over the composition classes of the respected Ferruccio Busoni, who had died the year before. He remained in his position at the academy until the escalating Nazi menace forced him to resign in March 1933 and flee the country, stopping for a few months in France (where he reembraced his paternal Jewish faith, which he had abandoned for Catholicism in 1898) before settling

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permanently in California by the end of the year. During his time in Berlin, Schoenberg developed his theory of “composing with twelve tones,” and demonstrated it in several pieces, including the Two Piano Pieces, op. 33 (December 1928 and October 1931).

The apparent fluency of thought of the op. 33 pieces led Malcolm MacDonald to call them “the subtlest and most relaxed of Schoenberg’s piano pieces.”

Opus 33a balances quiet passages of luminous dissonance with agitated, tightly contrapuntal episodes. Opus 33b is nervously rhythmic, sharing some of the jazz inflections that Schoenberg incorporated into Von Heute auf Morgen (From one day to the next), his contemporaneous comic opera about a bickering, modern-day husband and wife.

The first song by GEORGE GERSHWIN heard on Broadway was “The Real American Folk Song Is a Rag,” a number inserted into Nora Bayes’s vaudeville revue Ladies First in 1918. Following the success of Lady, Be Good! in 1924, George’s first complete musical with his brother, lyricist Ira, they produced Tip-Toes the next year and Oh, Kay! in 1926, the story (book by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse) of an English duke and his sister, Kay (named for composer Kay Swift, Gershwin’s paramour for the last ten years of his life) who were bootleggers in America during Prohibition. Gertrude Lawrence starred as Kay and introduced the show’s hit number, “Someone to Watch Over Me”; she was the first British performer to headline an American musical on Broadway. In addition to that

COMMENTS

introduced “God Bless America” on her weekly CBS radio program for Armistice Day, November 11, f r o m l e f t: George Gershwin, self-portrait, charcoal and watercolor on paper, 1930s | Portrait of Arnold Schoenberg, 1917, 1938, and the song—by a

by Egon Schiele (1890–1918) | Irving Berlin, ca. 1920 Russian Jewish immigrant without formal education American Songbook standard, the score or musical training, unable to speak a also featured “Fidgety Feet,” “Maybe,” word of English when he was brought “Do, Do, Do,” and “Clap Yo’ Hands.” to this country, and a naturalized IRVING BERLIN (1888–1989), citizen for less than a year when he born in Russia but living in New York wrote it—became a virtual second City since he was five, was called into national anthem.) Broadway producer military service in 1917 and stationed Sam Harris saw an opportunity in the at Camp Upton, near Yaphank on commercial success of Yip, Yip, Yaphank Long Island. The camp’s commander and, in 1920, formed a partnership with assigned the new recruit (an already Berlin to build the Music Box Theatre well-known songwriter) to put together on W. 45th street that would produce a show for an all-soldier cast to raise an annual revue, a lavish variety show money for a badly needed service with acts written around a common center, and Sergeant Berlin not only theme rather than the unified plot of a wrote the songs, lyrics, and dialogue, “book” musical. Both the new theater but also worked out the dance routines and Berlin’s Music Box Revue of 1921 and took a lead part. The revue, Yip, won rave reviews and large audiences, Yip, Yaphank, opened at New York’s and new editions of the revue were Century Theatre on August 19, 1918, produced at the Music Box for the earned $83,000 during its four-week next three years. Among the hit songs run, and made that much again during in the 1921 revue was “All by Myself,” a tour to Boston, Philadelphia, and which was a bestseller in sheet music Washington (D.C.). Its hit tune, sung by and several recordings, and promptly the composer—“Oh, How I Hate to Get became another standard in the Great Up in the Morning”—sold over a million American Songbook. copies of sheet music. The show’s The legend of Nicolò Paganini finale was originally to have been a new has haunted musicians for over two number titled “God Bless America,” but centuries. Gaunt, his emaciated figure Berlin decided to cut it because, he said, cloaked in priestly black, Paganini “it was like gilding the lily . . . to have performed feats of wizardry on the soldiers singing ‘God Bless America’ violin that were simply unimaginable as they marched down the aisle of the until he burst upon the European theater, off to war.” (Kate Smith, one of concert scene in 1805. Not only were his America’s most popular entertainers, virtuoso pyrotechnics unsurpassed, but CS O.O RG

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COMMENTS

his performance of simple melodies was of such purity and sweetness that it moved his audiences to tears. So far f r o m l e f t: Sergei Rachmaninov, oil portrait by Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), 1925. The State Russian Museum | Harold was he beyond the competiArlen, portrait by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964). Library of tion that he seemed almost, Congress, Prints and Photographs Division | Billy Strayhorn, well, superhuman. Perhaps, photo by William P. Gottlieb (1917–2006), ca. 1947. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division the rumor spread, he had special powers, powers not of this earth. Perhaps, Faust-like, he had one of the most beloved of all screen exchanged his soul for the mastery of classics, in no small part because of his art. Like most virtuoso instrumental- the superb musical score by composer ists of the nineteenth century, Paganini HAROLD ARLEN (1905–1986) and composed much of his own music, lyricist E.Y. “Yip” Harburg. The movie notably the breathtaking Caprices for was nominated for Best Picture, Arlen Unaccompanied Violin, works so diffireceived an Academy Award for “Over cult that even today they are accessible the Rainbow,” and Judy Garland was only to the most highly accomplished presented with a special miniature performers. The last of the caprices, Oscar “for her outstanding performance no. 24 in A minor, served as the basis as a screen juvenile.” for compositions by Schumann, Liszt, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington and Brahms, and was also the inspira(1899–1974), composer, bandleader, tion for the Rhapsody on a Theme of pianist, goodwill ambassador, and Paganini by SERGEI RACHMANINOV public personality, was one of the giants (1873–1943). of American jazz and popular music.

Judy Garland was never supposed Throughout his long career, Ellington to sing “Over the Rainbow.” In 1938 attracted some of the country’s finest when MGM acquired the rights to Black musicians into his organization, Frank L. Baum’s popular fantasy for none of whom was more talented than children, The Wonderful Wizard of the brilliant BILLY STRAYHORN Oz (1900)—already treated in a 1903 (1915–1967). Strayhorn was born in Broadway musical and a silent movie Dayton, Ohio, in 1915, studied music in 1925—producer Mervyn LeRoy tried in Pittsburgh, and joined Ellington’s to borrow Shirley Temple from Fox band in 1939 as composer, arranger, for the part of Dorothy, but failed. He and pianist; he remained with Ellington settled instead for sixteen-year-old until his death in New York in 1967.

Judy Garland, who had won notice in Strayhorn became so attuned to the MGM’s Broadway Melody of 1938 for style and spirit of Ellington’s music singing “You Made Me Love You” while that his arrangements, compositions, writing a fan letter to Clark Gable. The and sometimes even his piano playing Wizard of Oz, released in 1939, became were often mistaken for those of his

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COMMENTS

boss. They collaborated on many pieces have come to represent an entire era for the band, but among the numbers in American musical and social history. whose music and lyrics are acknowlAmong the first piano rags Joplin issued edged as Strayhorn’s alone is the was one named for the Maple Leaf Club morning-after-weary “Lush Life,” which in Sedalia, Missouri, where he was then he largely composed when he was a pre- working in 1899. “The Maple Leaf Rag,” cocious eighteen-year-old and revised he accurately predicted, “will make me over the next five years. He performed it the king of ragtime composers.” only privately for the next decade until In 1934 Austrian director Max vocalist Kay Davis formally premiered Reinhardt was conscripted by Warner the song at Duke Ellington’s Carnegie Bros. Studios in Hollywood to film Hall concert on November 13, 1948. a version of A Midsummer Night’s SCOTT JOPLIN (1868–1917) played Dream with Olivia de Havilland, Dick piano in honky-tonks as a teenager Powell, James Cagney, Joe E. Brown, before settling in East St. Louis. He and Mickey Rooney. He chose to published his first piano rags in 1899, use Mendelssohn’s incidental music and the Maple Leaf Rag sold half a as background, and took along million copies within a decade. The ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD success of the piece encouraged Joplin (1897–1957), who had established a to get married, write further rags, and splendid reputation in Europe with his expand his artistic operas, ballets, and horizons to include concert works, to ballet and opera. arrange the score.

After several years Korngold, who, as a of wandering in the Jew, felt increasingly Midwest, he moved uneasy in Austria, to New York in 1907 accepted other and spent enormous offers in Hollywood f r o m l e f t: Scott Joplin, 1912 | effort composing and and, when the Nazi Erich Wolfgang Korngold, portrait by trying (in vain) to find Anschluss in 1938 Georg Fayer (1892–1950), ca. 1920s. a publisher for his prevented him from Image Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna, Austria opera, Treemonisha. returning home, he His self-financed settled permanently production of the opera in 1915 failed, in California. For the next seven years, and Joplin’s spirit was crushed. The Korngold devoted his talents to creating following year, he was admitted to a a body of film music unsurpassed by that mental institution in New York and died of any other composer in the genre, and there on April 1, 1917, from the complihe won Academy Awards for Anthony cations of syphilis. Today, so widespread Adverse and The Adventures of Robin and persistent is the popularity of Scott Hood. Henry Bellamann’s melodramatic Joplin’s incomparable rags that they novel King’s Row was a bestseller CS O.O RG

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COMMENTS

when it was published in 1940, but its web of controversial themes set in a small town at the turn of the twentieth century in America made it unlikely to be adapted into film in those days of the restrictive, meticulously enforced Hays Code. Screenwriter Casey Robinson convinced Warner Bros., however, that he could tame the story’s more troublesome elements and get it past the censors, so Director Sam Wood took on the project in 1941 and enlisted an illustrious cast for the film, including Ronald Reagan (in the role that he said “made me a star”), Robert Cummings, Anne Sheridan, Charles Coburn, and Claude Rains. Randy and Drake is the music associated with the unlikely love affair of a local tomboy (Sheridan) and the son of a rich family (Reagan).

GEORGE GERSHWIN’s music drama about the disabled Porgy and his determined love for Bess, set in the 1930s in Catfish Row, an African American tenement in Charleston, South Carolina, is among the most popular and widely performed of all American operas. Besides its musical significance, Porgy and Bess also occupies an important place in the social evolution of our land—its premieres in Charleston, where the story is set, and Washington (D.C.) were desegregated on the stage and in the audience for the first time in the histories of those cities.

In “I Loves You, Porgy,” Bess sings of her temptation by Crown, her former lover and now a murderer on the run, before reassuring Porgy of her love for him.

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GERSHWIN’s Girl Crazy is a legend among Broadway shows. It provided the first starring role for Ethel Merman, featured Ginger Rogers as the ingenue, and boasted a pit orchestra that included Red Nichols, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, and Jimmy Dorsey. Though the plot was nothing more than a silly satire on a city slicker vacationing at a dude ranch in Arizona, the score by George and Ira Gershwin contained a treasury of their finest songs—“I Got Rhythm” (with which Ethel Merman belted her way to overnight stardom), “Embraceable You,” “But Not for Me,” “Bidin’ My Time,” “Sam and Delilah,” and “Treat Me Rough.”

The twelve etudes, the last works for piano by CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918), are divided into two books of six numbers each: the first set broaches traditional problems of technique; the second, matters of musical figurations. Though grown from the dusty but indispensable realm of piano pedagogy, these movements soar far beyond pieces merely for the practice of keyboard mechanics in their expressive and compositional content.

Paul Jacobs, one of the finest exponents of Debussy’s piano music, called them the composer’s “most finished, perfect, and yet adventurous [piano] pieces.” The penultimate movement of the etudes is a sweet essay titled Pour les arpèges composés (For Composite Arpeggios).

The Sonatine (little sonata) of 1903–05 is among the most important evidences of the classicist sympathies of MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937), a

COMMENTS

tendency that led him to employ the a national reputation as the self-styled traditional formal devices and crisp “King of Jazz” for his adventurous harmonic and melodic outlines that explorations of the new popular music differentiate much of his music from styles with his Palais Royal Orchestra. A Debussy’s deliberyear later, Whiteman ately misty ambiguity. told Gershwin about Ravel played the his plans for a special piece at his United program the following States concert debut, February in which he at the Gallo Theater hoped to show some in New York, on of the ways traditional January 15, 1928. The concert music could f r o m l e f t: Claude Debussy, ca. 1908, opening movement be enriched by as photographed by Gaspard-Félix follows the model jazz. He convinced “Nadar” Tournachon (1820–1910). of a compact sonata Gershwin to underAtelier Nadar, Paris, France. Gallica Digital Library, Bibliothèque nationale form. The first theme, take a work for piano de France | Ravel, as photographed by initiated by the solo (to be played Pierre Petit (1831–1909), 1907 interval of a descendby the composer) ing fourth, soon and Whiteman’s yields to a complementary subject of twenty-two-piece orchestra, and then restricted range and smooth contour. told him that it had to be finished in The second movement is indebted less than a month. The premiere of the to the quintessential dance form of Rhapsody in Blue—New York, Aeolian late-eighteenth-century European Hall, February 12, 1924—was one of the musical fashion: the minuet. The finale great nights in American music. Many is a rondo that alternates two thematic of the era’s most illustrious musicians ideas: a bounding, hunting-horn theme attended, critics from far and near and a lyrical phrase in uneven meters, assembled to pass judgment, and the derived from the falling-fourth motif of glitterati of society and culture graced the first movement. the event. Gershwin fought down his For George White’s Scandals of 1922, apprehension over his joint debuts as the twenty-four-year-old GEORGE serious composer and concert pianist, GERSHWIN provided something a and he and his Rhapsody in Blue had a little bit different—an opera, a brief, brilliant success. somber one-acter called Blue Monday (later retitled 135th Street), incorporating some jazz elements that White cut after Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member only one performance on the grounds at Case Western Reserve University and the that it was too gloomy. Blue Monday, Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program however, impressed the show’s connotes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals. ductor, Paul Whiteman, then gaining CS O.O RG

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PROFILES Conrad Tao Piano Conrad Tao is a pianist and composer celebrated for his boundary-defying artistry and powerful performances of traditional repertoire.

He appears regularly as a soloist with leading orchestras at major venues worldwide.

In the 2025–26 season, Tao returns to Chicago first as a soloist and later as a recitalist. He also returns to the Los Angeles and New York philharmonics.

Recital highlights include returns to Germany’s Klavierfestival Ruhr, the Celebrity Series of Boston, and the Seattle Symphony with Poetry and Fairy Tales, a program blending works by David Fulmer, Rebecca Saunders, Todd Moellenberg, Brahms, and Ravel.

Tao reunites with Robert Spano for performances of John Adams’s Century Rolls (San Diego Symphony) and Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety (Atlanta Symphony). He also joins Matthias Pintscher and the Konzerthausorchester Berlin for Pintscher’s NUR and travels to Tokyo to perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 17 with the NHK Symphony and Jaap van Zweden.

He makes his harpsichord debut at Princeton University in Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s Dies Irae.

Recent highlights include his return to Carnegie Hall with his original composition Keyed In and Debussy’s Twelve

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Etudes, as well as appearances with the San Francisco Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Cleveland Orchestra. In 2024 he toured Europe with the Kansas City Symphony and Matthias Pintscher to mark the hundredth anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue, with sold-out performances at the Elbphilharmonie, Berlin Philharmonie, and Royal Concertgebouw.

Tao continues performing his own works, including Flung Out, a homage to Gershwin, which he played recently at the Aspen Festival, and The Hand, a companion to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 1, commissioned and performed by the Kansas City Symphony.

His orchestral work Everything Must Go premiered with the New York Philharmonic and later in Europe with the Antwerp Symphony. He also tours Counterpoint, a collaboration with dancer Caleb Teicher, and performs regularly with the Junction Trio alongside Stefan Jackiw and Jay Campbell.

Tao’s acclaimed recordings include Voyages, Pictures, and American Rage (Warner Classics). He was featured in David Lang’s the loser (Cantaloupe Music) and collaborated with the brass quintet the Westerlies on Bricolage (Westerlies Records).

Conrad Tao is a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Gilmore Young Artist Award, and a New York Dance and Performance Award, The Bessies, for his collaboration with Caleb Teicher on More Forever.

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