SEPF: Soyeon Kate Lee

About This Show

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2026 Spoleto Festival USA Chamber Music attendees will have a second opportunity to hear pianist Soyeon Kate Lee, praised by The New York Times for her “huge, richly varied sound, lively imagination and firm sense of style.” 

First prize winner of the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Concert Artist Guild International Competition, Korean-American pianist Soyeon Kate Lee has been lauded by The New York Times as a pianist with “a huge, richly varied sound, a lively imagination and a firm sense of style,” and by The Washington Post for her “stunning command of the keyboard.”

As a Naxos recording artist, her discography spans a wide range of repertoire from two volumes of Scarlatti Sonatas, Liszt Opera Transcriptions, two volumes of Scriabin, and Clementi Sonatas. Ms. Lee’s recording of Re!nvented under the E1/Entertainment One (formerly Koch Classics) label garnered her a feature review in Gramophone Magazine and the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award.

A second prize and Mozart Prize winner of the 2003 Cleveland International Piano Competition and a laureate of the Santander International Piano Competition in Spain, she is a graduate of The Juilliard School where she was awarded the William Petschek Piano Debut Award at Lincoln Center and the Arthur Rubinstein Award upon graduation, and received her Doctor of Musical Arts from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her major mentors and teachers have been Richard Goode, Julian Martin, Robert McDonald, Jerome Lowenthal, and Ursula Oppens.

In 2022, Soyeon Kate Lee joined the faculty at the Juilliard School, making her the first woman of Asian descent to join the illustrious piano faculty. She was an associate professor of music in piano at the Cincinnati-College Conservatory of Music from 2014 to 2022, where she received the 2021 University of Cincinnati Mrs. A.B. “Dolly” Cohen Award for excellence in teaching. During the summers, she serves on the piano faculty at the Bowdoin International Music Festival and resides in New York with her husband and their two children, Noah and Ella.