NEC Prep Student and Incoming College First-Year to Perform with the BSO on Opening Night

Eighteen-year-old violinist Keila Wakao ’29, a current NEC Preparatory School student enrolling at the college this fall, will make her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut during the BSO's Opening Night Gala concert in September 2024 under music director Andris Nelsons. The BSO’s invitation follows her Grand Prize in the 2023 Boston Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition.

"Playing violin is almost another way of showing people who I am," she said in an interview with CBS News Boston. Watch the interview here. 

Wakao has performed solos and recitals throughout the United States, Japan, Germany, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Giving her first solo orchestra performance at age 9, she has since performed with orchestras nationwide. She is the first-prize winner of the 2021 Menuhin International Violin Competition and the 2021 Stulburg International String Competition and the recipient of the 2023 Aoyama Music Foundation Award for Upcoming Artists and the 2023 Salon De Virtuosi Career Grant.

Wakao studies violin with Donald Weilerstein and Soovin Kim at NEC Prep and is a senior at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts. Upon entering her first year at the college this fall, she will study with Miriam Fried.