Tiffany Poon

Pianist Tiffany Poon is a pioneer in using online streaming media to reach new audiences for classical music. She released her debut album on the PentaTone label in 2024. Poon was born in Hong Kong on December 29, 1996. She took up the piano at age four, and at eight, she was accepted into the Juilliard School Pre-College Division in New York for an eight-year course of study guided by Yoheved Kaplinsky. She received a full scholarship. Poon also took general high school classes in New York, attending the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side and graduating in 2014. She pursued college studies as part of the Columbia University/Juilliard School exchange program, studying piano with Joseph Kalichstein and Emanuel Ax. During her years of schooling, Poon won various prizes, including first prize and the Best Performance of a Concerto Award at the Eighth Moscow International Frederic Chopin Competition for Young Pianists in 2012. At Columbia, she graduated in 2018 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy. By that time, Poon was already a seasoned performer, having made her debut as a concerto soloist at age ten. She also launched a social media presence in 2017, and in 2020, she founded the nonprofit Together with Classical, intended to promote classical music and educational opportunities associated with it. Poon's social media efforts expanded dramatically after the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020. By May 2021, one streaming video channel had 290,000 subscribers, a figure that rose to nearly 325,000, with some 50,000,000 individual video views. As the pandemic receded, Poon was able to relaunch her career. She appeared at such venues as Carnegie Hall and Steinway Hall in New York City and the Sala Mozart in Bologna, Italy. She appeared with the Fort Smith Symphony Orchestra in Arkansas and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, and in 2023-2024, she made her debut with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, performing a Brahms piano concerto. Poon has made debuts at several prestigious European festivals, including the Dresdner Musikfestspiele, the Séries Jeunes of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, and the Moritzburg Festival in Germany, where she collaborated with pianist Louis Lortie and conductor Josep Caballé Domenech. Poon was signed to PentaTone Classics and released her debut album there, Schumann: Diaries, in 2024.
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