Pianist Conrad Tao, Santa Rosa Symphony celebrating 100 years of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’

Pianist and composer Conrad Tao has never regarded classical music as a separate genre of music.

The centuries-old musical form had opened up its gates to a global melting pot of harmonies and rhythms well before Tao’s birth in 1994.

“What my exposure to contemporary music and my genre-agnostic upbringing gave me was a sense that music does not have to get its value from the genre itself,” Tao said in a phone interview from his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Classical music doesn’t have to sound like one thing.”

This weekend, Tao will perform the original, jazz band version of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” — a timeless, irresistible work that fuses jazz with classical music — during the final subscription set of the Santa Rosa Symphony season.

The program in the Green Music Center’s Weill Hall, which celebrates the centennial of the first performance of “Rhapsody in Blue” with Gershwin at the piano, will be conducted by Santa Rosa Symphony Music Director Francesco Lecce-Chong.

Rounding out the program will be Gershwin’s “Catfish Row: Symphonic Suite” from “Porgy and Bess” and Edward “Duke” Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige” – Suite for Orchestra.

There will also be a world premiere of a 20-minute work for piano and orchestra by Tao himself.

A few years ago, when Lecce-Chong asked Tao to perform “Rhapsody in Blue,” he suggested that Tao also write his own piece for piano and orchestra that would utilize the same accompaniment as the original jazz band version of “Rhapsody in Blue” — an unorthodox blend of brass, woodwinds (including three saxophones), percussion, timpani, bass, eight violins and one banjo.

Tao’s new work, “Flung Out” for Piano and Orchestra, is a 20-minute homage to the legendary Gershwin composition that inaugurated a new era in American musical history.

“The audience will get to really appreciate how unique ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was in 1924,” Lecce-Chong said. “We’ll go back to that raw, wild, untamed version. And then have Conrad explore that same ensemble and those sounds.”

To mark its centennial, Tao started performing “Rhapsody in Blue” back in January with orchestras, as well as in a duo program with New York-based tap dancer Caleb Teicher (a must-see for dance aficionados), which appeared on NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts.

Later this year, he will be playing it as a solo piano work.

“It’s a piece that has never had just one form,” Tao said. “The manuscript was written initially on a two-piano staff … in a way, when I play it solo piano, sometimes I feel it is the most authentic version.”

The jazz band arrangement orchestrated by Ferde Grofe was inspired by the big band sounds of the 1920s, also known as the Jazz Age. It offers an unusual sonic quality, with timbres that you don’t get from orchestral arrangement featuring a full string section.

“You do get the lushness of the violins playing in harmony, but it’s very brass and reed forward,” Tao said. “You have an insistent oboe presence, which doesn’t play a lot but when it does, it needles you a little bit, and you’ve got the iconic clarinet.”

Like Lecce-Chong, Tao finds the jazz band version slightly less polished, with a lively energy that sounds a bit raw and rough around the edges.

“There’s a sprightly quality you can access with this leaner ensemble,” he said. “It sounds a little like a one-man band oompahing down the square.”

From the rising glissando of the clarinet – chosen by film director Woody Allen for the opening of his 1979 film, “Manhattan” — to the earworm melody made world famous by United Airlines, the work is regarded not only as Gershwin’s masterpiece but as, arguably, the best American work ever written.

To mark its official centennial, which happened Feb. 12, the Library of Congress created a video tribute from 20 performers across the country, speaking from venues as far-flung as a football stadium.

“The project shows how ‘Rhapsody’ and the rest of the Gershwins’ music is for everyone,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “You can enjoy their music in a grand symphony hall, in the classroom, in a parade, the practice field or while tapping your feet in the sand.”

According to Gershwin, the seeds for the work began to germinate in his mind while he was on a train trip to Boston. During the voyage, he was able to grasp its complete shape, from the solo clarinet opening to the triumphant piano chords at the end.

“It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang … I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise,” Gershwin said. “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.”

In writing his own work, “Flung Out,” Tao said he tapped into a few of the salient features of “Rhapsody in Blue,” then applied these particular characteristics to his own work and time.

“I think of it more as theater music, a piece of dance music and a tone poem,” he said. “It was composed on a two-piano staff and written for and at the piano. So I leaned into that. I wrote this piece at the keyboard, I wrote it for two keyboards and orchestrated it from there.”

For the dance aspect, Tao drew upon his experience of clubbing in New York and getting swept up in a crowd that is locked together into a single pulse. That’s where the title “Flung Out” came from.

“I was interested in trying to capture that feeling of being locked in with a group, which reminds me of the cathartic ensemble playing in “Rhapsody in Blue,’” he said. “And then there are these moments, when everyone — especially the pianist — is flung out of that and lost in their own reverie.”

Although he wrote much of the piece while on the road, Tao kept the sounds of New York City in his ear, substituting a subway train for a steam train.

“There is one moment in particular that is a direct transcription of the tones that certain subway trains make in New York,” he said. “I can actually load in real, ambient samples that I take myself or find online, and then think about how to orchestrate them.”

Finally, he plunked down a big, sentimental melody right at the midpoint of the piece — in imitation of the theme adopted by United Airlines — that’s a little bit retro.

“I was thinking about the ‘30s and ‘40s songwriting, and singers like Sinatra, with a particular sound and lush orchestra,” he said. “Then there is a section that is vampy, piano stuff. I was thinking of (pianist) Keith Jarrett, and it has a bluesy feeling that emerges out of the lush character.”

Tao wanted the piece to open with a bang, writing sixteenth-note runs for the piano that allow the listener to zoom in or zoom out, get caught up or flung out.

“You have the option to experience that rhythm as up close and noisy, or as a stream,” he said. “So the piece opens in a very tonally free language.”

“Flung Out” also incorporates extended piano solos that are notated as improvisation as well as moments of actual improvisation. At the end, it culminates with some “manic improvisation,” he said.

“This program excites me greatly because every orchestra in 2024 is celebrating the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ centennial,” Lecce-Chong said. “And Conrad Tao is a brilliant pianist and composer.”

The son of two scientists who immigrated to the U.S. from China in 1985, Tao recalls growing up in the Midwest surrounded by popular American music, from the Swedish band ABBA to “King of Pop” Michael Jackson.

“My parents chose to dive into American pop culture at the time,” he recalls. “They were early Madonna-heads.”

By the time he was born, his older sister was already taking piano lessons. At 18 months old, he started picking out nursery tunes by ear on the piano. His parents scrambled to figure out what to do with their precocious son.

“I started violin lessons at two-and-a-half because violins come in different sizes,” he said. “At three-and-a-half I started piano lessons with a family friend.”

Tao wrote his first melody when he was 3, a little ditty he called “Congratulations.” By the time he was 5, the family had moved to Chicago so he could start formal composition lessons. Then they moved to New York when he was 9, and he started touring and playing concerts professionally when he was 12.

Composing and performing contemporary music has forced Tao to rethink his relationship to notation, or how the music is written on the page. And it’s given him a new appreciation for the scores written by the great composers of the past.

“With Rachmaninoff, I can cut through the noise and see the shapes inside,” he said. “It’s humbling too, because you start to realize we have limited knowledge of what exactly they were going for … but that’s also what allows the music to keep feeling alive.”