Pianist Soyeon Kate Lee To Perform Gabriela Frank World Permiere In Weill Recital Hall At Carnegie Hall

The Walter W. Naumburg Foundation will be presenting Soyeon Kate Lee, 2010 Piano Award winner, on Wednesday, November 6, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Ms. Lee will be performing the world premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank's Sonata Andina No. 2, a Naumburg commission.

Ms. Frank states about the Sonata Adina No. 2, "Commissioned by the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, Inc., and written for Soyeon Kate Lee, Sonata Andina No. 2 for solo piano is inspired by the distinctly Andean concept of mestizaje as championed by Peruvian folklorist José Maria Arguedas (1911-1969) whereby cultures can co-exist without onesubjugating another. Allusions to the rhythms and harmonies of the mountain music of my mother's homeland of Perú abound, albeit freely transformed in the blender of my personal imagination. The opening "mountain"scherzo is followed by a call-and-response between a hymn and poignant tremolo calls from a charango, the Andean ukelele. The last movement is combative and muscular, an "escaramuza" which loosely translates to "skirmish."

Soyeon Kate Lee's program will include:

Janá?ek, Leos Piano Sonata 1.X 1905, From the Street

Sirota, Robert Mixed Emotions, I and IV (2003)

Beethoven, Ludwig v. Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110

Frank, Gabriela Lena Sonata Andina No. 2 (2013) world premiere

Stravinsky, arr. Agosti Firebird suite

Robert Sirota writes about his work Mixed Emotions, "I have always been interested in music's ability to express subtle gradations of affect and feeling, and particularly in its ability to project contrasting feelings in close succession (or simultaneously!). Mixed Emotions consists of four character pieces, each one exploring a set of opposites. The first, Agitato/Calmo, projects a state of mind that I frequently find myself in. The fourth, Tender Rage, expresses anger tinged with passionate affection.

Tickets, $15; $5 for students and senior citizens, are available at the Carnegie Hall Box Office or by calling CarnegieCharge at 212 247 7800. Weill Recital hall at Carnegie Hall is located at 154 West 57th Street.

Soyoen Kate Lee, the Korean- American pianist, was named first prize winner of the prestigious 2010 Naumburg International Piano Competition. She has already been hailed by The New York Times as a pianist with "a huge, richly varied sound, a lively imagination and a firm sense of style," while The Washington Post has lauded her for her "stunning command of the keyboard."

Ms. Lee's 2012/13 season highlights include performances at New York's Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Hall, Rose Studio, and the Kaplan Penthouse, as well as Boston's Gardner Museum as a member of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society Two. She collaborates this season with Daedalus and Brentano String Quartets, violinist Ani Kavafian, cellist Timothy Eddy, and members of the Chiara String Quartet, among others, and appears in recital at the Rhode Island College Performing Arts Series, Elon University, Pittsburg State University, Portland Ovation Series, Ridotto Music Festival, Music Mountain, and Sheldon Friends of Chamber Music. In celebration of Benjamin Britten's centennial, Ms. Lee performs the less traversed Britten Piano Concerto with the Adelphi University Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Lyndon-Gee. An active Naxos recording artist, her third CD featuring Liszt opera transcriptions will be released this season and she will return to the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto for a two- CD recording of Scriabin's piano works in April.

Ms. Lee has been rapturously received as guest soloist with The Cleveland Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, symphony orchestras of Columbus, Bangor, Bozeman, Boca Raton, Wyoming, Bozeman, Cheyenne, Napa Valley, Scottsdale, Abilene, Naples, Santa Fe, and Shreveport in the United States; the Daejeon Philharmonic Orchestra (South Korea), Ulsan Symphony Orchestra (South Korea), 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.

Recent recital appearances include New York City programs at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall and Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Art's Alice Tully Hall, Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Cleveland's Severance Hall, the Ravinia Festival's "Rising Stars" series, Auditorio de Musica de Nacional in Madrid - part of a 13-city tour of Spain, tour of the Hawaiian Islands, Krannert Center, and Finland's Maanta Music Festival.

Soyeon Kate Lee was featured on the January 2006 cover of SYMPHONY magazine's annual "Emerging Artists" issue and in the 2008 edition of Musical America's "More Thrills of Discovery." Her debut CD on the Naxos label, featuring sonatas of Scarlatti, was released in February 2007 to critical acclaim. KOCH International Classics (E1) released her second album in April 2009, for which she was awarded the 2009 Young Artist Award from the Classical Recording Foundation.

Ms. Lee earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees, and the Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School. While at Juilliard, she won every award granted to a pianist including the Rachmaninoff Concerto Competition, two consecutive Gina Bachauer Scholarship Competitions, Arthur Rubinstein Prize, Susan Rose Career Grant, and the William Petschek Piano Debut Award.

Winner of the 2004 Concert Artists Guild International Competition, as well as the Second and Mozart prizes of the Cleveland International Piano Competition and the Bronze Medal of the Paloma O'Shea Santander International Piano Competition in Spain, she has worked extensively with Robert McDonald and Jerome Lowenthal at Juilliard, and is currently pursuing her Doctoral studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with Ursula Oppens and Richard Goode. Ms. Lee is a Steinway Artist. She is married to Pianist Ran Dank.

The composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank was born in Berkeley, California, to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent. She explores her multicultural heritage most ardently through her compositions and her inspirations include the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera. Ms. Frank has travelled extensively throughout South America and her works reflect and refract her studies of Latin-American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework.

Winner of a Latin Grammy and nominated for Grammys as both composer and pianist, Gabriela also holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and a USA Artist Fellowship. A member of the Silk Road Ensemble, she is regularly commissioned by luminaries such as cellist Yo Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, and the Kronos Quartet, as well as by orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony. In 2013, she began her tenure as composer-in-residence with the Detroit Symphony and Maestro Leonard Slatkin and continues her longstanding creative relationship with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz on operatic works.

Gabriela Lena Frank earned her bachelor's and master's degrees at Rice University in Houston, Texas and her doctorate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her primary teachers in piano have been Jeanne Kierman Fischer and Logan Skelton and her primary teacher in composition has been William Bolcom. She currently makes her home in the Bay Area and travels frequently in South America.

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