First Prize winner of the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Concert Artist Guild International Competition, Korean-American pianist, Soyeon Kate Lee has been rapturously received as guest soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as many symphony orchestras across the US. On the international stage, Lee has appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Daejeon Philharmonic Orchestra and the Ulsan Symphony Orchestra (South Korea), the Orquesta de Valencia (Spain) and the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional (Dominican Republic), including performances under the batons of Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Jahja Ling, Jorge Mester and Otto-Werner Mueller.

As an active chamber musician, she frequently collaborates in many chamber music festivals throughout the US. Soyeon Kate Lee is a Naxos recording artist. Her discography spans Domenico Scarlatti Keyboard Sonatas, Volumes 8 and 21 (8.570010, 8.573795), Liszt Transcriptions and Arrangements (8.572589) and two volumes of Piano Music by Scriabin (8.573527, 8.573528), with forthcoming releases of Clementi Sonatas.

A graduate of The Juilliard School, Lee was awarded every prize available to a pianist at Juilliard, including the William Petschek Piano Debut Award at Lincoln Center and the Arthur Rubinstein Award. She is a Yamaha Artist and an associate professor of music in piano at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

For more information, visit www.soyeonkatelee.com.

The piano music of Muzio Clementi, or at least his pedagogical Gradus ad Parnassum, has been quite well known to generations of ambitious keyboard players. Clementi himself, born in Rome in 1752, was taken as a boy to England by Peter Beckford, cousin of the eccentric William Beckford. There he developed his abilities as a performer. His subsequent career brought success as a composer, teacher and pianist, and later as a manufacturer of pianos, an enterprise in which he employed the Irish pianist and composer John Field. He died at Evesham in 1832.

Piano Music

Clementi wrote a great deal of music for the piano, including more than a hundred sonatas. He published a number of pedagogical works, of which the Introduction to the Art of Playing the Piano Forte and Gradus ad Parnassum are the best known.