Chelsea Guo displays remarkable versatility as pianist and soprano
Chelsea Guo performed Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. File photo: Young Concert Artists
Many singers or instrumentalists also play the piano, although they tend to specialize in one area and indulge the other in less formal settings.
Pianist Chelsea Guo, the winner of the Young Concert Artists 2022 Susan Wadsworth International Auditions, added secondary studies in vocal performance during her time at the Juilliard School. For her Kennedy Center debut Wednesday night, presented by YCA in the Terrace Theater, she both played and sang, sometimes simultaneously.
On its surface, this dual specialization may initially seem like a gimmick without a sustainable future, but it has gained Guo, born in New York and raised in Connecticut, some attention. In 2023’s Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego, she appeared as soprano soloist in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and then, two days later, as piano soloist in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2.
Her Washington debut proved she has talents in both areas, but perhaps not yet sufficient mastery to attain the highest achievement in either alone.
Guo started as a pianist, and she showed a solid technique in Fauré’s Ballade, Op. 19, as well as a musically sensitive approach to rubato. The demands ramp up over the course of this long piece, inspired by Chopin, and Guo met them with varying success: demure trills and florid runs, with minor roughness in hand crossings and a lack of clarity in the layered contrapuntal voices.
Chopin’s Nocturne in E Major (Op. 62, no. 2) lacked some warmth and variety, due to an often overly harsh melodic attack, but the bel canto roulades in the final section came off with virtuosic brilliance. In the joking “Alborada del gracioso” movement from Ravel’s Miroirs, Guo impressed with graceful handling of the many technical challenges, except for some clunkiness in the guitar-like repeated notes.
On the vocal side, two well-known songs by Fauré, “Mandoline” and “Après un rêve,” revealed a soprano voice with a rounded fullness and warm legato, as well as some fitful French pronunciation issues. Pianist Francesco Barfoed, a colleague of Guo’s from Juilliard, accompanied with graceful reticence, but the combined result was not at a level that would necessarily stand on its own in a song recital.
In the second half, Guo merged her two performing roles in striking ways. Sitting down at the keyboard, she accompanied herself in “In mir klingt ein Lied,” a song adapted from Chopin’s Etude in E Major (Op. 10, no. 3), apparently with the composer’s approval. The song set the slow first section of the etude, with Guo sounding tenuous only at the high G-sharp of the melody’s climax. In a surprise turn, she proceeded to play the etude’s more difficult middle section flawlessly, with the return of the slow section, played first, melting into the song again.
This sleight of hand in genre switching led ingeniously into three selections from Pauline Viardot’s 12 Mazurkas de Frédéric Chopin. Viardot, a celebrated operatic mezzo-soprano who also played the piano quite well, added poetry by Louis Pomey to a dozen of Chopin’s mazurkas. Guo again played and sang these hybrid pieces, mastering what remained of Chopin’s virtuosic piano parts and the operatic vocal cadenzas added by Viardot, even interpolating a high C at the end of the third selection, “La jeune fille.”
Departing from the recital’s theme, Guo shifted from music centered on Paris to some American pieces. Kudos to her for the eccentric choice of the third movement (“The Alcotts”) of Ives’ Piano Sonata No. 2 (“Concord, Mass., 1840-1860”). Her performance brought together the movement’s odd juxtaposition of the highbrow and low, including unhinged quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and a schmaltzy parlor song.
Another pianist, Eden Chen, joined Guo for Two Songs, Op. 15, a recent composition by Beijing-born composer A Bu. (Both Chen and Bu also studied at Juilliard.) Set to poems by American poet Bert Meyers, these neo-romantic songs revealed influences ranging from Fauré to Broadway, ending again with an impressive high note. Less advisable selections, from gospel to cabaret songs by Weill and Sondheim, rounded out this eclectic grab-bag of a recital, again accompanied by Barfoed.
Fortunately, Guo returned to the sort of selection that made this recital so memorable for her single encore. Sitting again at the piano, she accompanied herself in Schumann’s longing “Widmung.” Not content with that show of her dual talents, Guo added in some of Franz Liszt’s showy piano transcription of this song, sometimes while singing, a feat that few, it must be said, would dare to attempt in public. Listeners are advised to watch closely to see what this remarkable young musician will do next.
Guitar duo Ziggy and Miles perform music by Bach, Debussy, Piazzolla, and others, with flutist Anthony Trionfo 7:30 p.m. March 19. yca.org
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