Michelle Woo

Michelle Woo was born in Bonn in 2003 and received her first piano lessons from Evgenia Nekrasova at the Henneberger Music School in 2008. Subsequently, she studied under Professor Arbo Valdma (2013) and Professor Gesa Lücker (2017). She started studying under Professor Bernd Goetzke at Hanover’s Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in 2019 and has been among his junior students since 2020.

Michelle was already a laureate of numerous German and international competitions, receiving First Prizes at the Ohrid Pearls Competition (Macedonia 2014), the 2013 and 2015 editions of the Rotary Piano Competition for Youth held in Essen, the Lanzhou International Piano Competition (2016), the Carl Bechstein Piano Competition for Children and Youth (November 2019, together with Liszt Special Prize) and several editions of the Jugend musiziert competition (2011, 2014, 2017 and 2019, Piano Solo and Chamber Music categories). She was also awarded Second Prize at the 2018 Shanghai Spring International Piano e-Competition and Third Prizes at the Anton Rubinstein International Piano Competition (May 2019) and the 2017 edition of the Rotary Piano Competition (together with the Bechstein Special Prize). Moreover, Michelle received a Special Prize from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben Foundation in 2017 and held a scholarship from the Carl Bechstein Foundation between 2017 and 2020.

She performed with the Estonian Pärnu Linnaorkester directed by Jüri Alperten at the age of nine and with the Frühlingsspitzen ensemble of Cologne’s Pre-College in the Trinitatiskirche church in 2019 and 2020. In 2019, she was on stage with the Camerata Louis Spohr orchestra directed by Bernd Peter Fugelsang and in 2020 with the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen under the baton of David Marlow.

(Last update: 2021)