Celia Daggy, viola
Photo credit: Micah Gleason
Virginia Symphony Principal Viola Celia Daggy was raised in a musical family in sunny Santa Monica, California. As a child, she studied piano and violin, eventually picking up the viola as a teenager. In high school, she competed in the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, performed at the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in the Arts ceremony for John Williams with conductor Gustavo Dudamel, and toured China with the National Youth Orchestra of the USA.
She completed her undergraduate in 2020 summa cum laude from Boston University, where she studied with Boston Symphony principal Steven Ansell. She was a Tanglewood Music Center fellow for three years, during which she won their annual mock-audition, and was a guest of the Boston Symphony in the Leonard Bernstein Centennial Gala Concert. She also attended the New York String Orchestra Seminar and Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina.
Throughout her college years, she was invited to perform in the Boston University Tanglewood Institute’s faculty recital series alongside members of the Grammy Award-winning Muir String Quartet, the Newton Chamber Music Society, and the Fall Foliage Chamber Music Festival in Rockport, Maine. In 2018, she gave the world premiere of Stephen Baillargeon’s viola concerto, written for her, as a benefit for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. After graduating, she was a principal fellow of The Orchestra Now at Bard College, where she can be heard on an album released by Bridge Records playing extensive solos in George Bristow’s Symphony No. 4 “Arcadian”.
As principal of the VSO, Celia has been featured in performances of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote. In high demand as an orchestral player, she has performed with the Boston, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and North Carolina Symphonies, toured New England with the Boston Pops, and joined the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in Los Angeles for a PBS broadcasted event celebrating Henri Mancini’s 100th Birthday. She is also the Assistant Principal Violist of the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival Orchestra, where she recently gave the world premiere of Scott Wheeler’s Blue Ridge Suite. She plays on a 2016 viola made by Andranik Gaybaryan in Northampton, Massachusetts. Outside of the musical world she enjoys running, learning about fine wines, and is an avid Los Angeles Dodgers fan. She currently lives in Chesapeake.
