As do a lot of college kids, Conrad Tao juggles his priorities.

He loves school, but he has to work.

What makes him different from his peers is that his work takes him around the world. Tao, 20, is a rising star in the classical music world, who will make his Maine debut when he joins music director Robert Moody and the Portland Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 26 at Merrill Auditorium in the first Sunday Classical concert of the season.

“I have in the past found school extremely rewarding and stimulating,” Tao said. “That is what sustains me. But sometimes there’s a lot of practicality to consider. How does one pull it off? How does one have it all?”

In Tao’s case, having it all means playing concerts across the world while finishing up his degree in piano in a joint studies program at Columbia University and The Juilliard School in New York.

As demands on his time increase, he finds it harder to give school the attention it requires.

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“Let’s just say it’s a work in progress,” Tao said from Norway, where he performed last week.

Before that, it was the Netherlands. Prior to arriving in Portland next weekend, he has concerts in Toronto.

His performance schedule is full through the spring.

Among those commitments, he keeps up with school.

Tao, who was born in Illinois, has built a resume that would impress for someone twice his age.

In 2011, the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars and the Department of Education named him a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. The National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts awarded him a YoungArts gold medal in music. He is also a Gil- more Young Artist, which recognizes promising American pianists. He won an Avery Fisher Career Grant and this season serves as artist in residence for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

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He signed with an agent when he was 12 and has played professionally for a decade.

“But it didn’t really start feeling like a career or even a long-term plan of any sort until I got old enough to start making sense of it,” Tao said. “During those early years, it was almost like a game. How can I do this? How can I make this work? It was like solving a puzzle.”

At about age 16, he realized that his game had become a career.

He’s known Moody since he was 14, when he joined the maestro for the Skaneateles Festival in upstate New York. He’s performed with Moody several times since, including in September at Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where Moody also works as music director.

They will work together several times in coming months.

He enjoys working with Moody because “he keeps it enjoyable and fun,” which leads to more adventurous collaborations. “It feels most possible to actually do things spontaneously if you are on stage and comfortable with who you are on stage with,” he said. “It’s a matter of feeling safe and accounted for on stage. It’s one of those interesting seeming contradictions, of which there are many, where in order to feel like you can jump off a cliff on stage, you have to have a very solid foundation.”

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Tao anchors a program that includes Grieg’s Piano Concerto. This is the only concerto that Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg wrote and also one of his most popular pieces of music. Tao appreciates its melody and its accessibility. Listeners will almost certainly recognize the opening sequence from various pop-culture references. It has been used in numerous TV shows and movies, as well as commercials by Nike and Range Rover.

“It’s got an iconic opening and is quite familiar to a lot of the audience,” Tao said. “I love pieces that have that sort of ubiquity.”

The program also includes Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 and Jennifer Higdon’s “Fanfare Ritmico.” A contemporary composer, Higdon wrote her piece in the late 1990s while contemplating “how all things have quickened as time has progressed.”

“Our lives now move at speeds much greater than what I believe anyone would have ever imagined in years past,” she writes in the program notes.


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