Pei-Shan Lee

Pianist Pei-Shan Lee’s playing has been praised in Strad Magazine as “glittering… sensuous, tender, and luminous,”  The Boston Musical Intelligencer writes of her “gorgeous tone and color range” with “monumental orchestral sonorities,”  The Boston Globe calls her “dynamic,” The Washington Post hails her as a “consummate” artist, and the Maine Classical Beat commends her gift for “holding it all together… as the composer directing from the piano.”

Lee’s concert career spans major halls in the U.S. and abroad. Highlights include performances at the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in New York; Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; Jordan Hall in Boston; and Severance Hall in Cleveland. Internationally, she has performed in Belgium, France, Germany, Finland, Israel, Taiwan, and China. She has appeared at prestigious festivals including Mostly Mozart, Caramoor, Great Lakes, Rockport, and Bowdoin in the U.S.; the Cello Festival in Brussels; ProQuartet in Paris; piano festivals in Spain and Russia; Taiwan’s Formosa Chamber Music Festival; and China’s Great Wall International Music Academy.

A deeply committed chamber musician, Lee has collaborated with the Ariel, Borromeo, Formosa, Harlem, Jupiter, and Szymanowski Quartets, as well as Principals of the major orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Diego, Toronto, and Munich. She has performed with violinists Cathy Cho, Stefan Jackiw, Ayano Ninomiya, Ian Swensen, and Donald Weilerstein; violists James Dunham, Ed Gazouleas, Kim Kashkashian, and Dimitri Murrath; and cellists Lluís Claret, Paul Katz, and Pieter Wispelwey, among many others. Based in Boston, she regularly appears with her esteemed colleagues of the New England Conservatory and has worked closely with Boston Ballet and guest artists of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Lee is also a respected educator and advocate for the collaborative piano field. A faculty member at the New England Conservatory since 2009, she mentors a talented class of graduate students, curates the Sonata Night series, and helped develop NEC’s unique five-year dual degree program (BM in Piano and MM in Collaborative Piano). In 2013, she launched the graduate collaborative piano program at California State University Northridge and founded the collaborative piano fellowship at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, where she has served as collaborative piano director since 2015. Her doctoral thesis, The Collaborative Pianist: Balancing Roles in Partnership, has become a widely referenced resource in higher education.

Lee’s experience extends to new music and documentary film as well. She was a founding member of Da Camera Society’s “DC8” new music ensemble in Los Angeles and appears in the films The Portrait (with Anne-Sophie Mutter) and Talent Has Hunger (with Paul Katz). She served as studio pianist for Itzhak Perlman at the Perlman Music Program in 2006 and later joined the faculty for PMP’s Sarasota Winter Residency. She has held positions at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Meadowmount School of Music, and the Chautauqua Institution. Her performances have been featured on WQXR, WGBH, and WRCJ, and her recording of the Strauss and Szymanowski sonatas with violinist Grzegorz Kotow is available on the ArchiMusic label.

Her principal teachers include Irma Vallecillo, Anne Epperson, Jonathan Feldman, and Solomon Mikowsky in the U.S., and Yu-Yun Chen, Su-Chen Kuo, and Song-Ren Hsu in Taiwan.