Chelsea Guo

Chelsea Guo is a musician with an unusual specialty: she studies both piano and voice, sometimes combining the two talents in a single performance. Before the age of 21, Guo had reached international prominence with performances in Britain, Germany, China, and beyond. Ziyao "Chelsea" Guo was born in 2001 in New York City and grew up in suburban Darien, Connecticut. Her first piano teacher was Svitlana Fiorito in nearby Stamford. She attended Darien High School and gave her first solo recital at Darien Congregational Church in 2012. By that time, Guo was already a seasoned performer, having performed at the U.S. State Department at age eight and traveled to China at nine to perform Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, with the Tianjin Symphony Orchestra. A host of strong showings at youth competitions helped Guo's prodigal career along, including semifinalist placement at the 2012 Gina Bachauer International Junior Piano Competition in Salt Lake City, a special commendation at the 2012 Ettlingen International Competition for Young Pianists in Germany, and a top prize that year at the Piano Teachers' Congress of New York Competition. Guo enrolled in the Juilliard School's Pre-College program, studying piano with Tema Blackstone, Choongmo Kang, and Haejeon Lee, and voice with Lorraine Nubar. She graduated with honors and began studies at the main Juilliard School program in New York. She has been a Young Scholar of the Lang Lang Foundation and a recipient of U.S. Chopin Foundation Scholarships for four years running. Along the way, she was making a splash with appearances like one on a New York radio station where she sang a Schubert song and accompanied herself -- with Liszt's virtuosic version of the piano part in place of Schubert's. Guo returned to China as a vocal soloist with the Tianjin Symphony Orchestra in 2018, and she has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, and a host of other top international venues, including the Mozarteum Summer Concert Series in Salzburg, Austria. Guo won first prize at the Schmidt Voice Competition in 2019 and a top prize in the 2020 National Chopin Piano Competition. During the coronavirus pandemic, she made an arrangement of the song The Blessing by Kari Jobe featuring herself as singer and pianist, along with a virtual gathering of vocalists, instrumentalists, dancers, and jazz musicians. Guo's post-pandemic plans included appearances at the Moritzburg Festival in Germany as both pianist and soprano, in various solo and chamber pieces, a performance with the Oregon Mozart Players, and promotion of her debut recording, Chopin: In My Voice, which was released on Orchid Classics in 2021.
© James Manheim /TiVo