China Times(Reported by Xuemei Zhao)In August 2025, I was invited to the Edinburgh Festival to attend a concert titled Soul of Chinese Music. Beneath Edinburgh Castle, a grand church became the setting for an encounter between Chinese and Western musical traditions.
One pianist once again caught my attention. Her performances of Dream of the Red Chamber Suite and Jasmine – Nostalgia moved many audience members to tears. It was the second time I had been struck by the emotional power of her live performance. The first had been at her original-works concert Precious Encounter in London.
August 2025 · Soul of Chinese Music, Edinburgh Festival (Photo: Zhao Xuemei)
After the concert, we arranged an interview. I wanted to understand what experiences and inspirations had shaped such an affecting musical voice. Over the following year, I watched her continue to compose, perform and develop new artistic projects. This August, the interview finally took place.
Her name is Xinyi Guo.
Xinyi Guo · Pianist, Composer and Cultural Producer
From Pianist to Cultural Practitioner
Many people first know Guo through her piano performances of music from Dream of the Red Chamber. Her arrangements and improvisations on familiar melodies have attracted more than 300,000 views online for a single work. Her two-piano piece When Sherlock Meets Pearl River Melodies brings British screen music into dialogue with classic Chinese film and television themes, and related works alsoreceived more than 200,000 views.
What interested me, however, was not the numbers, but the way she approaches a melody that listeners already know well. She rarely treats an existing version as an endpoint. Once a theme appears, its harmony, structure and emotional trajectory continue to evolve. Some works begin with no more than a single note, a feeling, or a momentary sonic idea. When a piece later enters a chamber-music setting, she develops the individual parts, instrumentation, and overall structure further.
This also explains why the same work is never quite identical from one performance to another. For Guo, improvisation is not an embellishment added to a finished piece; it is often the first stage of composition itself.
After moving to the UK in 2016, she gradually expanded from pianist to composer, initiator of cultural projects and practitioner of cross-cultural arts.
In 2023, Guo was invited to Chinese Culture Week in Albania, where she gave a solo piano recital at the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Tirana. The concert was covered by Tirana Diplomat and China Media Group, among others. Albania’s Minister of Culture, members of the diplomatic community and figures from the music community attended. After the recital, local musicians had furtherdiscussions with her, including 86-year-old composer Robert Radojaand conductor Zhani Ciko.
Solo recital The Sound of Music at the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Tirana (Photo: CMG journalist Gazmend Agaj)
With then Albanian Minister of Culture Elva Margariti and Wang Dexin, Chargé d’Affaires of the Chinese Embassy in Albania (Photo: CMG journalist Gazmend Agaj)
Conductor Zhani Ciko commented on her performance: “Her playing is not confined to technical expression; she is a composer and pianist who conveys the language of the soul with sincerity and sensitivity.”
The experience reinforced her belief that what cultural exchange leaves behind is not only the performance itself, but also the connections formed between real people — and the understanding, relationships and collaborations that continue after the music ends.
Rooted in Tradition, Not Bound by It
In 2025, she initiated the London concert Precious Encounter, built around her original compositions. Piano, pipa, Chinese opera, voice, strings and choir appeared together in a programme that included Elegy, The Light, To All Who Strive to Live and Distant Mountains. The concert was covered by China News Service and other media.
Distant Mountains, from the original-works concert A Rare Encounter (Photo: Huang Shudi)
Guo does not use the phrase “East–West fusion” easily. To her, placing a pipa beside a piano does not in itself mean that two musical languages have truly entered into dialogue. She is more interested in whether traditional vocal idioms have entered the structure of a work, whether Chinese instruments retain their own expression, and whether different musical languages genuinely communicate with one another.
“Being rooted in tradition does not mean preserving a fixed form. It means understanding the tradition itself; the mode of expression should belong to the present.”
The Work Matters More Than the Résumé
In recent years, Guo has continued to develop original works including Munich Station, Morning, A Lament for Fallen Flowers and Distant Mountains. Morning evolved from piano demo into a piano quintet. In May 2025, it was performed in the United States by the St. Petersburg String Quartet at Curtis Theater and received the Best New Composition Award at the International Music Competition. Guo subsequently advanced to the competition’s international final and performed at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York.
The St. Petersburg String Quartet and Yaqi Wang perform Xinyi Guo’s original work Morning (Photo courtesy of the organiser)
Jasmine – Nostalgia at Carnegie Hall, New York (Photo courtesy of the organiser)
From improvising alone at the piano, to chamber music, and then to stages in different countries, Guo has also reconsidered what it means for something to become a “work”. Improvisation belongs to the moment; but when a composition can leave its composer, be reinterpreted by other musicians and performed independently, it begins to acquire a life of its own.
Music is also another thread that has run through Guo’s life for many years. She and her husband, Professor Jinfeng Li, met through the piano and have performed together over the years. Li has long worked in scientific research while continuing to improvise and arrange on the piano. Their musical exchange has become one of the important contexts through which Guo has developed her understanding of improvisation, emotional expression and cross-cultural performance.
She did not dwell on this shared journey — one that began with the piano and has crossed study, research and the stage — in this interview. Yet it is clearly a story within her musical life that deserves to be told further.
Bringing Tradition onto Today’s Stage
As her own creative practice developed, she began to consider another question: how can cross-cultural collaboration move beyond a one-off appearance on the same stage and become a form of sustained co-creation?
In February 2025, Spring Sequence of New Sounds: East-West Dialogue Concert was held at Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London. Chinese Ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang and other diplomatic and cultural figures from China and the UK attended. As programme designer and music artistic director, Guo used relationships between the Yellow River Piano Concerto and The Moldau, and between British screen music and Chinese film and television melodies, to explore how different Eastern and Western musical languages can express and enter into dialogue around shared human emotions.
February 2025 · Royal Academy of Music · Two-piano dialogue, When Sherlock Meets Pearl River Melodies (Photo: People’s Daily, Yang Haopeng)
February 2025 · Royal Academy of Music · With Chinese Ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang (sixth from left) and cast and crew (Photo: People’s Daily, Yang Haopeng)
In 2026, the related project moved to Central Hall Westminster in London. Guo was primarily responsible for programme content, artistic conception and stage expression, bringing traditions including morin khuur, khoomei, Chinese opera and Yunnan’s Divine Bird Dance into a contemporary performance setting.
British review platform Theatre & Tonic subsequently awarded the performance four stars. The review noted that, unlike the short “programme collage” often seen at UK Chinese New Year events, the production displayed a fuller sense of scale, structure and clear artistic intention. Traditional instruments did not appear merely as cultural symbols, but actively shaped the development of both music and dance. The review also described the production as substantial and professionally executed, with a stage language rooted in tradition yet distinctly contemporary, and called it a “rare opportunity” for London audiences to encounter the richness and diversity of Chinese performance traditions.
2026 · Central Hall Westminster · A stage of diverse Chinese traditions (Photo: 4M24 Photography)
These projects show that Guo’s interest in “tradition” now extends beyond performance itself and into programme structure and stage language. She hopes audiences will encounter not just a few instantly recognisable “Chinese symbols”, but a China that is inherently rich, diverse and continues to evolve.
Art, Technology — and the Same Question
Beyond music, Guo has built a strong career in data, artificial intelligence and financial technology. She graduated from King’s College London in Big Data and subsequently held data- and AI-related management roles at Accenture’s London office and Lloyds Banking Group headquarters. She has been invited to share her work at industry conferences including FIMA Europe, Banking Transformation Summit and Digital Banking & Insurance Summit, and was interviewed by CX Insider for a feature titled “Managing Data in the Age of AI”. Lloyds Banking Group’s official website has also profiled her dual life in technology and music. In 2024, she received the Chinese Woman in Tech Award.
Research has also formed part of her professional life. She has published work on Twitter sentiment analysis and financial-market prediction, and during the pandemic conducted research on digital contact tracing for COVID-19. The work later drew attention from MIT Technology Review and was cited in medical and public-health research, including The Lancet Public Health.
2024 · Banking Transformation Summit, ExCeL London (Photo courtesy of the organiser)
On the surface, technology and music may seem far apart. Yet during the interview, I gradually realised that both paths ultimately point towards the same subject: people. Pandemic research concerns a fate shared by humanity; data and artificial intelligence shape the future we are moving towards together; and music, in the end, still speaks for love and loss, loneliness and hope, homesickness and belonging — and for emotions that language cannot fully express.
Let Tradition Keep Growing
Asked about the future, Guo did not offer an overly specific roadmap. “I hope to let inspiration from life lead me,” she said.
Over a decade, the stages have changed and so have her professional identities, yet what she returns to is not titles but the work itself.
“I am not afraid of failure, nor am I worried that I will give up. The inspiration I draw from music never runs out. It is a passion inside me, and where my soul belongs.”
As the interview ended, I returned to the question that had been there from the beginning: once tradition enters the present, what else can it become?
Perhaps the answer is already visible in her practice over the years. Tradition can be performed again and understood anew; it can meet new artists, new cities and new audiences. More importantly, it can re-enter people’s lives and continue to generate work that belongs to our own time.
Let tradition be heard — and let tradition keep growing.