Conrad Tao, piano

In Leg of Lamb, composed for me in 2020, Todd Moellenberg gives a pianist pitches to play as they read a poem by Bernadette Mayer; rhythms are contingent on the pianist’s speech, and thus change in every performance. Mayer’s poem takes as its subject poetry itself: “A line break/Could reflect/The way the sun breaks/Through the clouds or breakfast.”

What is the act of breaking a line? What might it imply? I like Mayer’s poem because it makes me reflect on my own program­ming. My goal is to use juxtapositions traversing centuries in my programs to explore what might be shared DNA under­neath wildly different aesthetics, and to hear familiar works in some new dimensions. I find the individual pieces and overall arrange­ment of Brahms’ Op. 118 Klavier­stücke already poetic as published; tonight, the extravagant gestures of David Fulmer’s new work, I have loved a stream and a shadow (With glitter of sun-rays, Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from hea­ven)—which takes as its title and subtitle lines from Ezra Pound’s “Ortus” and “Canto III”—both interrupt and enliven the exper­ience of hearing Brahms again. But Mayer’s poem also pokes at us: “Starting over’s our addiction, a dead/End and where does that leave us?” I’ve been constructing programs like this for about 10 years now, and sometimes I wonder if I am simply falling into a pattern. I want to lean into that ambivalence, explore it, feel it out.

Rebecca Saunder/Mirror, mirror on the wall also has a poetry about it. Its musical material asks us to hear between the sounds, listening not only to what is actively pushed out by the performer but the cloudier resonances that result from those actions. The familiar is reconfigured: at the center of the work is a “waltz” that appropriately centers around actions of the feet—pedal noise plays a starring role—but strips the form of its usual identifying surface features, reducing it to its meter, to the fundamental shape and feel of the dance. The piece’s title evokes the fairy tale of Snow White; when playing it I find myself reflecting on beauty, truth, and the dangers of vanity. I believe in beauty; I pursue it above all else. A commit­ment to true beauty demands that I not cling anxiously to any single aesthetic sur­face; the paradox is that it also demands attention to the surface, attention to and love of sound.

The fantastical and poetic most vividly commingle in Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, which takes after prose poems from Alo­ysius Bertrand’s heady, mysterious book of the same name. While Ravel’s subtitle is “three poems for piano after Aloysius Bertrand,” Bertrand’s is “fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot.” This is work with the fundamentals of art, and translation into different mediums, on its mind. Bertrand’s collection also extensively explores Gothic themes: the titular Mon­sieur Gaspard de la nuit, supposedly the true author of these poems, is also the Devil himself. Perhaps this is also a way of articu­lating ambivalence about the role of the artist, insisting that we consider the shadow as we revel in the sublime. And whether we are listening to the seductive coos of the ever-tragic and ever-dangerous Ondine, or observing a corpse hanging from the gallows at sunset, or hiding ourselves from the grotesque Scarbo’s mischievous pirouettes, Ravel’s music—colorful, exqui­sitely propor­tioned, capable of turning from gorgeous to terrifying in a single breath—is truly sublime.

—Conrad Tao

by Thomas May

“I was thinking about fairy tales and poetry while putting this program together,” says Conrad Tao. “I especially wanted to hear Brahms’ Opus 118 Klavierstücke—with their expressive mystery and elegant balance—in this context.”

At first sight, Tao’s dual career brings to mind a modus operandi deeply rooted in the Western classical tradition. The lineage of
virtuoso pianist-composers who moved seamlessly between identities includes the likes of Mozart, Busoni, and Rachmaninoff —all of whom similarly began as child prodigies. But as a 21st-century manifestation of the performer-composer, Tao has been charting unknown territory and reshaping the model of the virtuoso pianist.

A firm conviction of the “insistently present aspect of music-making,” as Tao puts it, guides his approach not only to performance but to programming as well. Rather than merely reshuffle selections from the standard repertoire and splice them with new pieces, his programs in themselves represent acts of composition.

The impetus for his latest recital program was a desire to spend time with Brahms’ solo piano music and, specifically, to play the Op. 118 Klavierstücke in public for the first time.

The opportunity to introduce new pieces by his colleagues David Fulmer and Todd Moellenberg in the context of the Brahms, Tao recalls, inspired him to consider interrelated themes of poetry, fantasy, and fairy-tale when he composed this program: that is, when he put it together, which is what the Latin root of to “com-pose” in fact means: to put objects together.

Tao’s field of associations additionally led him to think of the poetry of Rebecca Saun­ders’ music. “A continuum is drawn across these works,” he notes, “with the absence of phrasings” in Saunders’ Mirror, mirror on the wall and “the free, rapid gestures of David Fulmer’s I have loved a stream and a shadow serving as poles.” In the concluding work, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, “the fantastical and poetic most vividly commingle.”

Johannes Brahms
Klavierstücke, Op. 118
In his early solo works for the keyboard, Johannes Brahms tended toward monumental reworking of classical forms, whether in sonatas or variations. But after impressing such mentors as Robert and Clara Schumann and other figures, and despite “being admittedly more comfortable composing for the piano than for any other medium,” writes biographer Jan Swafford, “Brahms paradoxically gave up sonatas entirely … and spent the heart of his career barely composing solo piano music at all.” When he returned to composing for solo piano in 1892, after a long hiatus, his focus was excessively on collections of poetically concise miniatures.

In 1892, the year before he turned 60, Brahms produced 20 small masterpieces that he published as Opus 116 through 119. Along with any hidden personal significance—possibly entailing “love songs to lost women in [the composer’s] life”—these late piano works, in Swafford’s assessment, represent “a summation of what Brahms had learned, almost scientific studies of compositional craft and of piano writing, disguised as pretty little salon pieces.”

Four of the six Op. 118 pieces, his second-to-last collection for solo piano (published in 1893), are called intermezzos; the third and fifth pieces are labeled Ballade and Romanze, respectively. Dedicated to Clara Schumann, they convey a multilayered sensibility of regret and reminiscence that marks their language as “late Brahms.” The collusion of technical self-awareness—of how the language of music is made to communicate, including awareness of its limitations—with subtle poetry that evokes complex (even partially contradictory) emotional states lies at the heart of their “expressive mystery,” to borrow Tao’s apt phrase.

Aside from No. 1, each piece is cast in a simple ABA song form; in duration, they range from around two minutes (No. 1, Intermezzo in A minor) to between five and six minutes (No. 2, the Intermezzo in A major, and No. 6, the concluding Intermezzo in
E-flat minor). The set opens eruptively and passionately, but the A minor Intermezzo unexpectedly reaches the major in its final
gestures, suggesting a story that must be continued. In fact, Brahms calls four of the six pieces in Op. 118 intermezzi—a particularly ambiguous designation, since by definition, an intermezzo is an “entr’acte,” something implicitly intended to come between large, more “substantial” fare (above all, in the context of the theater), rather than to be considered the whole meal in itself.

David Fulmer
I have loved a stream and a shadow
Tao plays with this tension between a self-standing composition and one intended to link to something else with his programming concept, which interleaves the Brahms pieces with other compositions.

A New York-based composer, conductor, and violinist, Fulmer wrote his tripartite piece for Tao and has dedicated the score to him. The title and subtitle come from the poetry of Ezra Pound: the 1913 poem “Ortus” (which means “birth”) is the source of the line “I have loved a stream and a shadow,” while “with glitter of sun-rays/Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven…” comes from “Canto III,” which he published in 1917.

The Pound references are, however, not programmatic. They occurred to Fulmer only after he completed the composition.
“I can never find a title until the double bar is drawn,” he says. Rather, the connection is that Pound “creates a mood that is
reflected in the dialect I use musically.” Fulmer compares his poetry to “lemonade made with 100%, lemon juice, no sugar. It’s so concentrated.”

Each of the three movements of I have loved a stream and a shadow is “completely different temporally, spatially, and registrationally,” according to Fulmer, yet they are tied together “as an aggregate collection that articulates a single artistic concept.” The first movement begins with relentlessly rapid music that moves from the uppermost range of the keyboard to the other extreme. Fulmer dispenses with bar lines while at the same time writing intricately calculated rhythmic structures—an organization that “builds in a lot of freedom for Conrad within the fabric of the unfolding process” without leaving room for improvisation. He describes the movement as a whole as “gestural” and made of mercurial, fleeting shifts from bright to dark and brooding music.

Beginning with a cloudy atmosphere, as Fulmer puts it, the left and right hands intersect in the second movement, mimicking little bells in the high register and low drones in the bass that punctuate the piece throughout. The third movement, which features the greatest amount of surface variety in the work, “starts vibrantly, with the left and right hand in perfect coordination” and precedes with “a disintegration of rhythmic profile.”

Tao points to a “vivid sense of line” in Fulmer’s music; at times, its lines give the impression “that they can go on forever.” He compares this quality to his impression of Brahms as a notably “line-oriented” composer. “Whenever I play his music, I search for the continuous line. The beautiful thing about Brahms is that oftentimes that line is articulated as a totality. It cannot be expressed in just one voice but is better expressed as the space between voices. Brahms is all about counterpoint—especially the first and fourth pieces in Op. 118.”

Rebecca Saunders
Mirror, mirror on the wall
The poetry and ambivalence implicit in Brahms/Op. 118 pieces thus prompted Tao to consider juxtaposing them with other kinds of poetry. The London-born, Berlin-based Rebecca Saunders, who in 2019 became the first female composer to win the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, brings an intense curiosity to her exploration of the full timbral potential of an instrument and to the “sound surfaces” of her musical material. Mirror, mirror on the wall, an early work for solo piano from 1994, reflects what Saunders describes as her process, when she composes, of imagining that she holds “the sounds and noises in my hands, feeling their potential between my palms, weighing them. Skeletal textures and musical gestures develop out of this. Then, like pictures placed in a large white room, I set them in silence, next to, above, beneath and against each other.”

Todd Moellenberg
Leg of Lamb
Todd Moellenberg’s work presents another strategy “to interrupt and enliven the experience of hearing Brahms again.” The Los Angeles-based Moellenberg is a pianist with a special interest in the avant-garde legacy and a conceptual artist who traverses several disciplines, drawing on poetry, video, and performance art. Leg of Lamb, which he wrote for Tao in 2020, developed from experimental work with speech rhythms and melody generation from language in which Moellenberg was engaged during the first lockdown. The process involves transcribing any musical pitches, from A to G, that appear in a given text, such as a letter or poem. As the performer recites the text, they simultaneously realize the corresponding pitches.

When Tao introduced Moellenberg to the work of the late American poet and visual artist Bernadette Mayer, he selected her 2015 poem Leg of Lamb as the basis for a composition using this process. Thus the first two lines (“A line/Break could reflect”) “contain” the pitches A-E-B-E-A-C-D-E-E-C. Moellenberg’s initial experiments had been with a French horn, but he adapted the process for the much larger range of the piano so that Tao uses the full expanse of the keyboard as he reads the poem.

Mayer’s poem itself enacts an intriguing interrogation of the art of poetry and how it is processed—whether read or recited—by playing with the tension between “prosaic” language and the artificiality of line breaks. Unexpected corners are rounded, embracing insights into human psychology: “Starting over’s our addiction, a dead/End and where does that leave/Us?”

“It can become quite disorienting as to what the line break itself is doing,” says Moellenberg, “whether rhythmically or in how it re-emphasizes certain ideas or disorients them. She’s very playful about the idea of getting lost.” Part of the challenge for the performer is to play the pitches “that land inside those words, as you read it plainly. The act of smoothing over your voice and not making it stilted to accommodate your playing is itself very difficult.” Tao points out that the “rhythms are contingent on the pianist’s speech, and thus change in every performance.”

The act of breaking a line of poetry, moreover, is a metaphor for imposing caesuras in performance time—whether a musical phrase or a break between one composer and another. Even an intermission can be seen as a kind of “line break.” Mayer’s poem thus has special appeal for Tao, “because it makes me reflect on my own programming.”

Maurice Ravel
Gaspard de la nuit
“There’s something that seems not of this world to me,” says Tao of Fulmer’s music, “something that feels extremely celestial.” This in turn led him to associations with “fantastical elements” and to Maurice Ravel’s 1908 Gaspard de la nuit in particular, since he finds a “sonic continuity” between the two pieces. A year after the death of Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841), the pen name of the French poet who straddled Romanticism and Symbolism ahead of his time, a collection of his prose poems appeared under the title Gaspard of the Night: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot. Their tone of macabre fantasy and hallucination inspired Ravel—a composer keenly attracted to fairy-tales in all their dimensionality—and he selected three as the basis for his suite. The tripartite design resembles a three-movement sonata with a flashy opening, a slow central movement, and an all-out rallying of forces in the finale.

“Ondine” depicts a water nymph attempting to seduce a mortal to her realm. Ravel marries his alluring melody to intricately textured, shimmering figurations that lead to a climax, ending the piece with a depiction of the nymph bursting into laughter and vanishing “in a sudden shower.” The Gothic “Le gibet” chillingly paints the image of a man’s corpse still hanging from the gibbet against a desert background. Ravel structures the piano’s figurations around an endlessly repeated B-flat representing “the bell that tolls from the walls of a city, under the horizon.” The poetic source for the longest piece of the suite, “Scarbo,” recalls the spooky narratives of E.T.A. Hoffmann with its depiction of the apparition of a mischievous goblin as a kind of night terror. The final intermezzo from Brahms/Op. 118, which bookmarks the program, sublimates the Dies irae motif but reaches a more-resigned rapprochement with death.

A paradox is embedded in these “three Romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity,” as Ravel described them. On the technical level, Ravel’s demands make Gaspard (above all the third piece, “Scarbo”) among the most terrifyingly difficult works in the piano literature. Yet the point of this virtuosity is, on another level, to transcend the purely musical, aspiring to a novel synthesis of impulses from other disciplines: “to say with notes what a poet expresses with words,” as Ravel remarked.

—Thomas May

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. Along with essays regularly commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, the Juilliard School, the Ojai Festival, and other leading institutions, he contributes to the New York Times and Musical America and blogs about the arts at www.memeteria.com.