By Milner Fuller, Manager of Classical Programming
Imagine yourself in a Vienna concert hall in 1795, waiting to hear a young Beethoven perform a new piano concerto. You know him as a gifted pianist, but he has not yet secured his place in musical history. Around his concerto, you might hear other recent music by composers of his time. You cannot know which of these works people will still be playing two centuries later. You have come to hear what musicians of your own time have to offer.
The C-major concerto we now call Beethoven’s First (though it was composed after the work published as his Second) emerged from this same concert culture, sustained largely by new and recent music. Beethoven was contributing to a conversation among contemporaries. Earlier composers had shaped his musical imagination, but their works did not dominate concert programs as his own now do. Today, a composer introducing a new orchestral work enters a different conversation. Beethoven is still here. So are Mozart, Brahms, Mahler, and generations of composers whose music has earned a lasting place in our lives. Their presence is one of the great pleasures of concertgoing. It also makes the task of adding something new an extraordinary challenge.
One response to that challenge is to make the encounter itself the starting point. When an orchestra commissions a living composer to write a companion piece to an established work, the familiar score becomes an invitation to create something new. The response might borrow a theme, challenge an idea, or find an unexpected connection. The assignment leaves a central question open: where in the music of the past might a living composer find the seeds of a new work?
Indianapolis audiences have encountered that question before. For its Beethoven 2020 celebration, the ISO commissioned nine composers to write works paired with Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Each offered a different way into music we thought we knew. Conrad Tao received a similar invitation from the Kansas City Symphony: to write a companion to Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. His response, The Hand, began with the sight of Beethoven’s manuscript.
We are accustomed to hearing Beethoven after the decisions have been made. His manuscript lets us watch him make them. Notes disappear beneath dense strokes of ink; others remain visible through the crossings-out. The page becomes a record of revision, leaving an impression of apparent chaos behind the concerto’s familiar sound. For Tao, these pages offered a tangible encounter with the person composing the music: trying something, reconsidering it, and deciding what should come next.
Placed beside the manuscript, Tao’s own score offers a striking visual echo. Heavy black bars extend across its staves, directing musicians to continue an activity: repeating a figure, sustaining a texture, or improvising within specified limits. Though they serve different purposes—Beethoven’s strokes cancel material while Tao’s bars extend it—both make the act of figuring something out visible. Beethoven’s manuscript preserves choices already made; Tao’s score transfers part of the decision-making to his performers. He defines the materials and their limits while allowing certain relationships to emerge as the musicians listen and respond. The manuscript records uncertainty before an audience ever hears the concerto. In The Hand, some of that uncertainty unfolds in front of us.
Both Beethoven’s cancellations and Tao’s continuation bars make the act of figuring something out visible.
The title gathers those acts together: the hand composes and performs. Tao’s guiding sonic idea also asks something of the listener. The orchestra grows out of the piano’s rumble, with melody first registering as something nearly imagined. Rather than simply receiving a line, we listen for one taking shape.
Listening to the premiere recording, I found myself reaching for music I already knew, though Beethoven was not what came to mind. His manuscript had set Tao’s imagination in motion, but the sounds themselves carried me into the musical world that had grown up since his lifetime. The independent wind lines brought Ives to mind. In the middle of the work, as the first great wave of sound crested and fell away, the orchestral texture thinned. The piano continued hammering a stark figure beneath sustained wind tones while a series of small crescendos stirred through the divided violas. I thought of a moment in Britten’s War Requiem. Following the cataclysmic horror of the Libera me, two soldiers who had been enemies in life meet in the stillness beyond death and reconcile. Looking at the scores later clarified what my ear had recognized: both passages draw attention to the viola’s distinctive color through brief crescendos against sustained wind tones.
In The Hand, those viola swells briefly alter the color of the surrounding texture while the piano keeps striking. The music remains active even at its most suspended, then gathers into another great wave of orchestral activity. I am not suggesting a quotation from Britten, but the association gave me a way into Tao’s music. The musical past enters the concert hall through listeners as well as composers. Beethoven’s concerto may be The Hand’s designated companion, but it need not be the only music we hear in its company.
This smoothed profile of relative sound intensity in the premiere recording reveals two broad waves of orchestral activity around the quieter central passage.
No two performances of The Hand need unfold in exactly the same way. In Indianapolis, a line that seemed buried may come forward; fragments may overlap differently, and the piano may find another melody within the same chords. Such changes can alter the way tension gathers and what we hear in the stillness that follows. Tao has given the music a larger shape while allowing discoveries to happen within it. I am curious what will catch my ear in Indianapolis, and whether the music will call up the same associations or lead me somewhere new. That uncertainty is part of the invitation to hear The Hand live: to follow the musicians as they make choices whose consequences we hear together.
The act of choosing continues when Tao turns from composer to interpreter. In the concerto’s first movement, he will perform what he calls “the anachronistic big one,” the most expansive of the three cadenzas Beethoven later wrote for the work. The concerto belongs to Beethoven’s early years in Vienna; the cadenza came years later, after his musical language had traveled far beyond it. When the orchestra falls silent and the pianist stands alone, the older Beethoven enters the music of his younger self.
That anachronism completes the pairing. We begin with a composer of our time looking back at Beethoven’s unfinished page. We end with Beethoven himself looking back at a work from his youth. The canon may carry a work across centuries, but it cannot hold the music still. A recording captures one performance: one balance of sounds, one set of choices. In the concert hall, the music must be made again, shaped by the musicians and discovered by listeners in the same moment. The Hand makes that renewal unusually explicit, but it happens in Beethoven too. Tao begins by asking how a composer today might answer Beethoven. In the cadenza, we hear Beethoven answer himself.
Hear this conversation across centuries when Conrad Tao joins Richard Egarr and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for The Hand and Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, October 23–24 at Hilbert Circle Theatre. Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 completes the program.
Get Tickets https://www.indianapolissymphony.org/event/tao-beethoven-and-mozart/