Christopher Jessup Is Writing Honest Music for a Difficult Age
The New York–based composer and pianist has gone from a Juilliard graduation to the London Symphony Orchestra in just a few years. He tells Classical Post why he believes a short, beautiful piece can carry as much weight as a symphony — and why his music keeps returning to climate and mental health.
At a glance
Who: Christopher Jessup — composer and pianist, based in New York (b. 1998)
Training: The Juilliard School (Pre-College and College); composition with Melinda Wagner, piano with Jerome Lowenthal; graduated 2021
Label: PARMA Recordings (its Navona imprint)
Known for: Choral and orchestral music, musical miniatures, and works engaging climate and mental health
Key collaborators: London Symphony Orchestra; The Crossing (the four-time Grammy-winning choir)
Recognition:The New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe praised his “The Mississippi at Midnight” for its “eerie wonder,” calling it the best track on the album (Nov. 2024)
Upcoming:
Oct. 2026 — new album with The Crossing (PARMA Recordings), his music featured alongside composers Stacy Garrop and Robert Maggio
Nov. 12, 2026 — premiere of the flute-and-piano version of his Suite, with Lindsey Goodman and Clare Longendyke, at Ohio University (Athens, OH)
Jan. 8, 2027 — single release of the title track Emergence, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra (filmed at LSO St Luke’s, London)
Feb. 5, 2027 — Emergence, his solo album featuring the London Symphony Orchestra (PARMA Recordings)
2027 — album with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra and soprano Bree Nichols
2027 — premiere of Impetus for Violin, Cello, and Piano at Carnegie Hall
Christopher Jessup is a composer and pianist based in New York, and one of the more quietly assured voices to come out of his generation at The Juilliard School. Signed to Navona Records since he graduated in 2021, he has, in just a few years, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, seen his choral music taken up by the Grammy-winning ensemble The Crossing, and been singled out by The New York Times. What’s striking in conversation, though, is how little of that trajectory he frames as ambition. For Jessup, the through-line is simpler and more stubborn: music should be honest, and it should make people feel less alone.
From playing jazz by ear to Juilliard
Jessup came to the piano around the age of eight, mostly by ear, and it was jazz — not the conservatory repertoire — that first shaped him. “Early on I was actually drawn to jazz, which really shaped how I think about rhythm and harmony today,” he says. Over time he learned to notate those ideas and translate them into compositions, a path that carried him to Juilliard’s Pre-College and then its College division, where he studied composition with the Pulitzer Prize–winning Melinda Wagner and piano with Jerome Lowenthal, graduating in 2021. He has built the years since on a refusal to choose between the two disciplines.
A breakthrough in Italy, when the composer and the pianist became one artist
The moment the two halves of his musical life fused, he says, came when he performed his own piano concerto with an orchestra in Italy — the performance his biography marks as the one that first drew international attention. “Up until that point, composing and performing had felt like separate paths, but that experience really brought them together,” he recalls. “Being on stage and hearing an orchestra play the music I’d written for the first time, and stepping into the role of a soloist with them, was incredibly formative. It made the idea of a life in music feel tangible.” The confidence it gave him, he adds, has stayed with him ever since.
Recording a solo album with the London Symphony Orchestra
The centerpiece of Jessup’s near future is a solo album, Emergence, due February 5, 2027. Despite the name, it is not a piano record but a compendium of his compositions — including two works recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, one of the great orchestras in the world. He is candid that the collaboration still feels scarcely believable. “Recording with the London Symphony was an unbelievable experience — it’s really hard to put into words,” he says of the June 2024 sessions.
The path there was less mysterious than the prestige suggests: Navona Records connected him to the orchestra, he sent his score, and it landed. “It felt like a good match to them, and they recorded it,” he says. The album — a project PARMA Recordings, Navona’s parent label, has built around his music — gathers a range of his voices: a solo flute work for Lindsey Goodman, a suite for viola and piano with violist Brett Deubner and pianist Allison Brewster Franzetti, a solo saxophone piece played by an uncle who is a professional saxophonist, and a solo piano work Jessup performs himself, reinforcing his identity as a composer who plays his own music. Its title track, recorded with the orchestra and filmed at LSO St Luke’s in London, arrives first as a single on January 8, 2027, ahead of the full release. Asked what recording with an ensemble of that caliber means for his career, he doesn’t hedge: “Working with ensembles of that caliber significantly elevates my profile as a composer. There’s just no other way to put it. It’s life-changing.”
The Crossing, and a New York Times breakthrough
If the LSO album is the headline, Jessup’s relationship with The Crossing may be the deeper story. The Grammy-winning, socially conscious choir — also introduced to him through Navona — recorded his choral cycle Astronomia. One of its movements, “The Mississippi at Midnight,” caught the ear of The New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe, who in November 2024 named it the best thing on the album and praised its “eerie wonder.” “That was a really wonderful, unsolicited thing to happen,” Jessup says — the kind of recognition that, for a young composer trying to be heard in a crowded field, usually arrives only after decades, if it arrives at all. In October 2026, the choir returns to his music on a new PARMA Recordings album that places his work alongside pieces by the composers Stacy Garrop and Robert Maggio.
His work with the ensemble is ongoing. He is writing a new piece for The Crossing about how the brain heals from trauma, told through the metaphor of water. “Water can be very much like the mind,” he explains. “It can be still or storming; it finds new pathways when blocked.”
Why his music takes on climate change and mental health
That instinct — to point his music at something urgent — runs through his catalog. He recently completed Ice Memory, a four-minute brass quintet about melting glaciers in which, he says, “over the course of the four minutes, the texture disintegrates and dissolves” — the sound itself enacting the thaw. Climate and mental health recur in his work not as branding but as conviction. “With the climate, it’s something that affects all of us,” he says. “And with mental health, I’ve had loved ones who have struggled. I think it’s our duty as artists to use our art to address things that might be uncomfortable to talk about.”
He is equally firm that seriousness needn’t mean scale. “I don’t think music has to be long in order to be meaningful,” he says. “A lot of composers write really long pieces because it proves something. I don’t think that has to be the case.” He points to Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces as an early spark for his love of the miniature, and to Mahler, at the opposite extreme, for how he thinks about long-form scale. Among living composers he returns often to Caroline Shaw and David Lang; at the piano, he counts Richard Goode — “a phenomenal pianist” — among his models.
Finding his voice: from “thorny” to lyrical
Perhaps the most revealing thing Jessup offers is an account of what he had to unlearn. At Juilliard, he says, he felt pressure to write “very thorny, angular music that wasn’t necessarily the most pleasant to listen to.” With distance, that has changed. “My voice has softened,” he says. “I’m not afraid of things sounding pretty. Before, it just had to sound as bizarre as possible — but that’s who I was pretending to be. My real voice actually does have lyricism in it.”
What success means to him
Ask him where all of this is heading and he reaches not for markers but for meaning. Long term, he hopes to keep deepening his choral work — he is drawn to the idea of bringing multiple choirs together, and to a consortium commissioning a piece for him. But the goal beneath the goals stays constant. “I want to make art that isn’t just expressive, but that can genuinely make a difference in how people feel and understand the world,” he says. Asked how he wants to be remembered, he answers without hesitation: “As someone who wrote music that was really honest. I hope my work created a space for reflection and connection — that it helped people feel a little less alone, especially around the difficult or fragile parts of being human.”
Which is, in the end, his definition of success. “Success is really a state of mind,” he says. “External markers can come and go, but that sense of purpose and integrity in the work is ultimately what defines it for me.”
Christopher Jessup’s solo album Emergence is due February 5, 2027, on PARMA Recordings. Watch the full Classical Post conversation on YouTube.
Prefer to listen? Stream the audio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
