Patricia Tao, piano

Pianist Dr. Patricia Tao has led an active life as a performer, teacher and concert organizer. As pianist of the Guild Trio for 10 years, she performed throughout the United States and Europe and won the prestigious United States Information Agency Artistic Ambassador competition, resulting in a seven-country European tour. The Trio was awarded the position of Trio-in-Residence at the Tanglewood Music Center, where they were lauded by the Boston Globe as a “beautiful new landmark” on the concert stage and had the opportunity to work with Leon Fleisher, Yo-Yo Ma and Gilbert Kalish. With the Guild Trio, she was awarded one of four grants nationwide by Chamber Music America, to establish a concert residency at the Stony Brook University medical school.

The Trio also commissioned and premiered numerous works, including William Bolcom’s Spring Trio, Sheila Silver’s To the Spirit Unconquered, Harvey Sollberger’s From Winter’s Frozen Stillness, and works by Bradley Lubman, Daniel Weymouth, Peter Winkler, and Perry Goldstein. The Trio recorded Sheila Silver’s work on the CRI label (reissued on New World Records) and served as Trio-in-Residence at the University of Virginia for two years, where she performed and taught chamber music and contemporary ensemble.

As soloist, Dr. Tao toured the United States for Columbia Artists’ Community Concerts series and as an “Artistic Ambassador” for the USIA, and has performed in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Germany, China and Hong Kong. Dr. Tao’s live performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio’s Performance Today, WNYC’s Around New York, WQXR’s The Listening Room, the public television series Premiere Performances out of St. Louis, Chicago’s WFMT and Our Music on CBC. She has recorded a solo compact disc on the Arktos label featuring works of Schubert, Liszt, and Corigliano.

For ten years, she performed with Trio Voce (Jasmine Lin, violin, Marina Hoover, cello) with whom she recorded the Chopin and Strauss cello and piano sonatas on the Centaur label and two Trio recordings on the Con Brio label. As concert organizer, Dr. Tao has served as Artistic Director of the Edmonton Chamber Music Society’s Summer Solstice Music Festival for the past 16 years. The series has welcomed chamber musicians from across North America with imaginative and entertaining programming.

Dr. Tao received her undergraduate education at Harvard University, a Master’s degree with Distinction from Indiana University and her doctorate from the Stony Brook University, where her principal teachers were Leonard Shure, Gyorgy Sebok and Gilbert Kalish.

She has adjudicated many local and provincial festivals, given master classes at numerous schools, including the Universities of Ottawa and British Columbia, Ithaca College, and the Conservatories of Barcelona, Prague, Bratislava Wuhan, Taizhou and Hangzhou, and has held performance residencies at the Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, the medical school of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the University of Virginia.

She taught at Western Washington University and the University of Virginia, and from 2002-2022, taught piano and chamber music at the University of Alberta, where she was Professor of Music and served as Undergraduate Associate Chair and Interim Chair of the Department of Music.

She is Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta and now lives in Kelowna, where she serves as Artistic Director of Chamber Music Kelowna.