Celia Daggy, viola

Virginia Symphony principal violist Celia Daggy has been hailed as “glittering” by the Boston Musical Intelligencer, and her playing has been praised as “beautiful and memorable” by Sequenza 21. 

Raised in a musical family in Los Angeles, she studied piano from age 3, eventually picking up the violin, then the viola as a teenager. In high school, as a member of the American Youth Symphony, Ms. Daggy performed at the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in the Arts ceremony for John Williams with conductor Gustavo Dudamel. She was a quarterfinalist in the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, and toured China with the National Youth Orchestra of the USA. 

After moving to Boston in 2016, Ms. Daggy became an active musical presence in New England as an orchestral performer, chamber musician and soloist. She was a Tanglewood Music Center fellow for three years, having won their annual mock-audition in 2017. During her second season, she was invited to perform with the Boston Symphony in the Leonard Bernstein Centennial Gala Concert at Tanglewood. She also attended the New York String Orchestra Seminar and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. She completed her undergraduate in 2020, graduating with a Bachelor of Music summa cum laude from Boston University, where she studied with Boston Symphony principal Steven Ansell. 

As a chamber musician, she has performed with the Grammy Award-winning Muir String Quartet at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute’s faculty recital series, 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. 

Prior to joining the Virginia Symphony, Ms. Daggy was an acting member of the North Carolina Symphony during the ‘21-’22 season. She was also 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”. 

She plays on a 2016 viola made by Andranik Gaybaryan in Northampton, Massachusetts. Outside of the musical world, she enjoys exercising, baseball, and exploring the local craft beer scene.