Philippe Chao enjoys a wide-ranging career as an orchestral, solo and collaborative performer as well as a respected teacher and coach. A tenured member of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, he also performs as Principal Violist with The Post-Classical Ensemble and as an extra musician with the National, Detroit, and Baltimore Symphonies. He spends his summers as a member of the Grand Teton Music Festival in Jackson, Wyoming.

An avid and experienced chamber musician and recitalist, he has performed throughout the Washington DC region with numerous organizations including Musica Aperta, the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra, the IBIS Chamber Music Society, the Chamber Music Series at the United States Holocaust Museum, the Alden Theater Recital Series, the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, and the Czech and Ukrainian Embassies’ series. His involvement with Musica Aperta brought him on tour to San Juan, Puerto Rico, San Francisco, Miami, and Boston under the auspices of the Spanish Presidency of the European Union. Other appearances have included performances at the Supreme Court, the Garth Newell Music Center, Music Mountain, and Oxford University, UK with the Coull String Quartet. As part of the Cappelletti-Chao Duo, Philippe and his wife, violinist Eva Cappelletti have performed throughout the country in a variety of venues from concert halls to music festivals to salon concert series’ and have appeared on live radio. Their decade-long collaboration has resulted in several works having being written specially for them, including Divertimento by the renowned American composer, Adolphus Hailstork.

As a concerto soloist, Philippe has appeared with the National Repertory Orchestra, the Virginia Symphony, and the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra. He recently appeared as the featured soloist with the Fairfax Choral Society at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. Concerto-competition victories earned him performances with both the University of Minnesota Chamber Orchestra and the Cleveland Institute of Music Symphony Orchestra. Philippe teaches at the George Mason University School of Music, Montgomery College, and Georgetown University and has been a coach for the DC Youth Orchestra Program and a faculty member of the American Festival for the Arts and the Eastern Music Festival. He was a guest artist-teacher for the State Department’s Artist Exchange Program at the Kennedy Center in 2007 and since 2011, a faculty member of the Ovations Summer String Academy. He served as an adjudicator for the Asian American Music Society’s annual String Competition and the Dorothy Farnham Feuer Memorial Scholarship Competition. Earning degrees from the University of Minnesota and the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, Mr. Chao also studied at the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies in Aldeborough, England and at the Cleveland Institute of Music. His mentors include renowned pedagogues Roland and Almita Vamos, the Boston Symphony’s Michael Zaretsky, international recording artist and soloist Gérard Caussé, William Primrose protegé Donald McInnes, and the Cleveland Orchestra’s Principal Violist, Robert Vernon. Philippe’s string sponsor is d’Addario.