Chelsea Guo A top prizewinner in the 2020 10th National Chopin Piano Competition, She earned praise for her “strong musicality”, “thoughtful performance”, and (in the Larghetto of the Piano Concerto No. 2), “a floating line that marked her as a fine Chopin stylist” (South Florida Classical Review). A graduate with honors from The Juilliard School’s Pre-College as a double major in piano and classical voice, Chelsea is currently in her second year at Juilliard College as a piano major under the tutelage of Hung-Kuan Chen. She was honored to be a Young Scholar of the Lang Lang Foundation, a young artist of the Artemisia Akademie at Yale, and a recipient of the US Chopin Foundation Scholarships for four consecutive years. She also achieved recognition as a prizewinner at the Ettlingen International Piano Competition and the Young Artists Concerto Competition at Piano Texas.
From an early age, Chelsea has always been drawn to singing. Currently a voice student of Lorraine Nubar, she has increasingly included a few vocal selections in her piano programs which afford her audience the enriched opportunity of experiencing music in a broader context, often displaying the influence that singers had on composers of their time. She was featured in 2019 on WQXR’s “Young Artist Showcase” in a full hour of solo piano and vocal performances, including one virtuosic Schubert song in which she accompanied herself, playing Liszt’s virtuosic transcription of the song for solo piano, in place of the original Schubert piano part. The show’s host, Robert Sherman, called her performance “extraordinary”, saying that he had never experienced such an accomplishment in his 42 years on the show. Chelsea has been recognized for her vocal gifts by the 2019 National YoungArts Classical Voice Competition, which awarded her the Silver Medal, and by her selection as a semi-finalist for the 2019 Presidential Scholar for Arts. She won First Prize in the 2019 Schmidt Voice Competition and was granted scholarships by the prestigious George London and Gerda Lissner foundations.
In addition to Stern Auditorium and Weill Hall in Carnegie Hall, Chelsea’s solo piano performances have taken her to venues in England, Austria, France, Poland, Italy, Germany, China, Japan and Canada. In the 2018-19 season, she gave recitals at Wigmore Hall in London and Howard Assembly Room of Leeds as a young guest artist of the Leeds Piano Festival. She was heard in a six-concert tour of China under the auspices of the 8th Shenzhen Piano Music Festival. She was also featured in solo recitals presented by the Mozarteum Summer concert Series in Salzburg and was presented by the Impromptus Concert Series in the New York Tristate area. The 2019-20 season found Chelsea deeply immersing herself in the music of Frederic Chopin, in preparation for the National Chopin Piano Competition. It was capped off by a “Chopin @ Home Salon Concert” presented on the Internet by the Chopin Foundation, performing in the inaugural “Play it Forward” virtual concert presented by the Lang Lang Foundation, and joining other artists of Chinese heritage in two concerts broadcast from China, sponsored by Radio Beijing and by the China Philharmonic.
Chelsea’s appearances as concerto pianist have included the Ft. Worth symphony under the baton of Maestro Barry Douglas, the Torun Symphony in Poland, the Midwest Young Artists Symphony in Chicago, and the Connecticut Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra. Having debuted as a pianist with the Tianjin Symphony Orchestra at age nine, she returned in 2018 as vocal soloist under the baton of Maestro Tang Muhai.
Always looking for ways to make the world a better place and recognizing the deflated spirits of everyone in the Juilliard community after several months of coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, Chelsea undertook a highly unusual video project that saw thirty fellow Christian students collaborate in a message of solace and peace. Inspired by a song of Kari Jobe, “The Blessing”, whose text is the famous Aaronic blessing in the book of Numbers, Chelsea made an instrumental/choir arrangement in which she was featured as a soloist and pianist, along with a virtual gathering of vocalists, instrumentalists, dancers and jazz musicians. She did the complete audio and video editing and production, completing the project in time for it to be uploaded to YouTube and Facebook on the day of Juilliard’s 2020 commencement, as a blessing to the graduates and an uplifting send-off to the entire Juilliard community at the end of the school year.
In the 2020-21 season, Chelsea will be presented in solo recitals by the U.S. Chopin Foundation, the Miami International Piano Festival, and the Boca Raton Steinway Piano Gallery.
Rachmaninoff Elegy by 13 yr old Chelsea Guo, "From the Top" #297, Nov., 2014