Kristin Lee

A recipient of the 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, as well as a top prizewinner of the 2012 Walter W. Naumburg Competition and the Astral Artists’ 2010 National Auditions, Kristin Lee is a violinist of remarkable versatility and impeccable technique who enjoys a vibrant career as a soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and educator. “Her technique is flawless, and she has a sense of melodic shaping that reflects an artistic maturity,” writes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Strad reports, “She seems entirely comfortable with stylistic diversity, which is one criterion that separates the run-of-the-mill instrumentalists from true artists.”

Kristin Lee has appeared as soloist with leading orchestras including The Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, New Mexico Symphony, West Virginia Symphony, the Ural Philharmonic of Russia, the Korean Broadcasting Symphony, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Guiyang Symphony Orchestra of China, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and many others. She has performed on the world’s finest concert stages, including Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Kennedy Center, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Steinway Hall’s Salon de Virtuosi, the Louvre Museum in Paris, Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection, and Korea’s Kumho Art Gallery. She has been featured on the Ravinia Festival’s Rising Stars Series and has toured throughout northern Italy. She has curated programs that premiered at Philadelphia’s World Cafe Live and New York’s (le) Poisson Rouge in which she commissioned five new works for the violin and various instruments. Lee has given recitals in New York’s Merkin Concert Hall and Florida’s Kravis Center, and presented concerts around the United States with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Her recent engagements include debuts with the Tacoma Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Nordic Chamber Orchestra of Sweden, a return performance with the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional of Dominican Republic, and concerts around the United States with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Highlights of her 2017-18 season include the Moab Music Festival, Utsey Chamber Music Series, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Highlands Chapel Series. Lee will also continue to perform and tour with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

An accomplished chamber musician, Lee is a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center following her completion of a three-year residency as a CMS Two artist. She has appeared the Ravinia Festival, Music@Menlo, La Jolla Festival, Medellín Festicámara of Colombia, the El Sistema Chamber Music festival of Venezuela, the Sarasota Music Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern of Germany, the Hong Kong Chamber Music Festival and the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, among many others. Lee is a principal artist with Camerata Pacifica, sitting as The Bernard Gondos Chair. She is also the concertmaster of the groundbreaking Metropolis Ensemble, with whom she premiered Vivian Fung’s Violin Concerto, written for her, which appears on Fung’s CD Dreamscapes, released on Naxos. Fung’s Violin Concerto won the 2013 Juno Award. She is also a member of Steve Coleman’s Natal Eclipse, a new hybrid chamber-jazz ensemble that explores the very foundations of group improvisation and spontaneous composition.

Lee’s performances have been broadcast on PBS’s “Live from Lincoln Center,” the Kennedy Center Honors, WFMT Chicago’s “Rising Stars” series, and on WQXR in New York. She also appeared on Perlman in Shanghai, a nationally broadcast PBS documentary that chronicled a historic cross-cultural exchange between the Perlman Music Program and Shanghai Conservatory.

Lee’s many honors include awards from the 2015 Trondheim Chamber Music Competition, 2011 Trio di Trieste Premio International Competition, the SYLFF Fellowship, Dorothy DeLay Scholarship, the Aspen Music Festival’s Violin Competition, the New Jersey Young Artists’ Competition, and the Salon de Virtuosi Scholarship Foundation. She is also the unprecedented First Prize winner of three concerto competitions at The Juilliard School – in the Pre-College Division in 1997 and 1999, and in the College Division in 2007.

Lee is the co-founder and artistic director of Emerald City Music, a chamber music series that aims to present authentically unique concert experiences and bridge the divide between the highest caliber classical music and the many diverse communities that reside in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. The inaugural 2016-17 season presented fourteen performances, twenty-five outreach events, and over forty-five lauded musicians visiting Seattle and Olympia from twelve global cities. The 2017-18 season features the world premiere of 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winner John Luther Adams’ …there is no one, not even the wind, co-commissioned by Emerald City Music and five other national arts organizations.

Born in Seoul, Korea, Lee began studying the violin at the age of five, and within one year won First Prize at the prestigious Korea Times Violin Competition. In 1995, she moved to the United States and continued her musical studies under Sonja Foster. Two years later, she became a student of Catherine Cho and Dorothy DeLay in The Juilliard School’s Pre-College Division. In January 2000, she was chosen to study with Itzhak Perlman after he heard her perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with Juilliard’s Pre-College Symphony Orchestra. Lee holds a Master’s degree from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Itzhak Perlman and Donald Weilerstein, and served as an assistant teacher for Perlman’s studio as a Starling Fellow. She is a member of the faculty of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and has served on the faculties of the LG Chamber Music School in Seoul, Korea, El Sistema’s chamber music festival in Caracas, Venezuela, and the Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival.

Artist biography from 2019