Anna Guo

Anna Guo, a.k.a. Guo Ming Qing (Chinese name: 郭敏清) is Chinese-born, Canada-based yangqin player. She has been active as a traditional musician since the 1960s, having performed in China under her birth name Guo Minqing. She has been teaching and playing the yangqin for more than 30 years. She is a former professor at the renowned Shanghai Conservatory of Music. From 1985 to 1996, Guo was head of the Shanghai Women's Silk String Quintet, a successful Chinese music ensemble that gained a solid reputation worldwide. The quintet recorded two albums that are very hard to find outside of China and toured extensively in Asia and Europe. The release of her two solo albums - Collection of Yang-qin Solos (1992) and Masterpieces performed by Yang-qin Masters (1995) - established Guo as the leading yangqin musician in China. In 1996, Guo immigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto, Ontario, where she adopted the more Western-friendly name of Anna Guo. She resumed teaching and soon formed the Dunhuang Chamber Ensemble, which performs traditional Chinese music across North America. Her two books on the art of playing the yangqin - New Yang-qin Music Compositions (1996) and Basic Course on the Yang-qin (1998) - are essential texts for students of the instrument. Her CDs and books are available in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, where they are immensely popular. In 2001 she joined a select roster of Asian-Canadian musicians appearing on the Montreal label Oliver Sudden and released the solo album "Chinese Traditional Yang-Qin Music", her most widely available recording to this day. Her extraordinary performances and profound interpretation and knowledge of Chinese music have won Guo both critical and public acclaim as one of the world's best yangqin players. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.