Chelsea Chen

Chelsea Chen's dynamic playing has taken her to the far corners of the world.  Her solo concerts offer a unique mix of traditional organ repertoire along with piano/orchestral transcriptions and contemporary music.  The Los Angeles Times has praised her  “rare musicality” and “lovely lyrical grandeur,” and a compositional style that is “charming” and “irresistible.”

Recent highlights include performing with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. In 2019-20 she was a featured artist in festivals in Beijing (China), Uppsala (Sweden), Zürich (Switzerland), and Stuttgart, Germany. 

Chelsea originally hails from San Diego, where her formative music teachers were organists Leslie Robb (St. Paul’s Lutheran, San Diego) and Monte Maxwell (US Naval Academy, Annapolis) and pianists Baruch Arnon (New York City), Jane Bastien and Lori Bastien Vickers (San Diego). She studied under Paul Jacobs and John Weaver at The Juilliard School in New York, and under Thomas Murray at Yale.  In addition she won a Fulbright scholarship to Taiwan, where she collected folk songs and wrote organ solo and chamber music. 

Ms. Chen has recorded multiple CDs: Reveries (2011) at Bethel University, Live at Heinz Chapel at the 2005 Convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, Eastern Treasures (2010) with violinist Lewis Wong, Live at Coral Ridge (2014), and Explorations for Cello and Organ (2018) with cellist Joseph Lee. 

Chelsea was Artist-in-Residence at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church from 2013-2017, and currently lives with her husband in Zürich, Switzerland. Learn more about her at chelseachen.com.