Vienna Teng
With her album "Warm Strangers" in the early 2000s, Vienna Teng celebrates her breakthrough, the album takes her into three Billboard Charts at once and is listed at number 2 on the bestseller list at Amazon. She appears on the legendary David Letterman Show and is a support act for Joan Baez, Marc Cohen, Indigo Girls and Shawn Calwin. Tours not only take her across the USA, but she also delights European audiences at her numerous concerts. Sometimes she performs with strings, sometimes with the congenial multi-instrumentalist Alex Wong.
And all this despite the fact that the Asian-American Californian actually had a future-proof job with one of the big names in the IT industry in Silicon Valley. It was only logical, since she had studied and graduated in computer engineering at the highly renowned Stanford University.
But her childhood and youth dream was always music. She was already playing the piano at the age of five and composing at the age of six. She remained self-taught and even gave herself a stage name as a child: "When I played some rock stuff and made the childish decision to become a star one day, I really wanted to have a stage name too. That's how I came up with Vienna Teng, as a homage to the city of Vienna, which I imagined to be simply fabulous as the home of Mozart and Beethoven.
Her music is somewhere between folk and pop and a little jazz and a little classical. Her wonderful soprano voice can range from very soft to mighty powerful, her lyrics are clever and introspective. Vienna Teng is a pragmatic philosopher in her all self-composed and lyricised songs, she reflects on destinies, family, relationships, politics, religion. She raises her voice, takes a stand - far beyond all everyday pop music. But she doesn't just sing, she is also personally committed, for example, to "Habitat for Humanity", an organisation that works worldwide for humane housing, even for the poorest.
Like her IT career before, Vienna Teng interrupts her music career, goes back to university and studies ecology, which leads her to her new field of activity in climate protection, alternative energy and waste management. There are also changes in her family: she becomes adoptive mother to her partner's two children and has a child of her own in 2020.
For a long time, music was just a hobby, but now this wonderful artist - who we have missed for so long - is pushing her way back onto the concert stages. Back with her versatile piano playing, her catchy melodies, her profound lyrics and her wonderful voice. Welcome back Vienna Teng!
