Peruvian & Mexican American soprano Vanessa Becerra began the 2022–23 season with a debut at Opera Delaware for Opening Night at The Grand, followed by debuts with Florida Grand Opera for El matrimonio secreto (Carolina), Opera Omaha for Le nozze di Figaro (Susanna), and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis for Così fan tutte (Despina) along with returns to Minnesota Opera for La fille du régiment (Marie) and Houston Grand Opera for El Milagro del Recuerdo (Un Mujer). On the concert stage, she debuted with the newly formed San Antonio Philharmonic. She has made role and house debuts at the Metropolitan Opera, Intermountain Opera Bozeman, Austin Opera, and Opera Parallèle, and has returned to Washington National Opera for Sankaram’s Rise (Alicia Hernández), part of the world premiere tetralogy Written in Stone. Additional recent appearances include those at Opera San José, Arizona Opera, St. Croix Valley Opera, Fort Worth Opera, Washington National Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, the Glimmerglass Festival, and Atlanta Opera.

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.”

Highlights of recent seasons include appearances at the National Gallery, Library of Congress, Gina Bachauer Concerts, Purdue Convocations, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on tour, San Francisco Performances, Camerata Pacifica tour, Chamber Music Chicago, and the Cleveland Art Museum. She was a member of CMS’s Bowers program, and is a regular participant in numerous chamber music festivals including the Great Lakes, Santa Fe, and Music Mountain Chamber Music Festivals. Ms. Lee has collaborated with conductors Carlos Miguel Prieto, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Jahja Ling, and Jorge Mester with the London, San Diego, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Naples symphony orchestras, among others.

She has commissioned works by prominent composers and has given world premieres of works written by Frederic Rzewski, Paola Prestini, Marc-André Hamelin, Alexander Goehr, Gabriela Lena Frank, Texu Kim, and Huang Ruo.

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 the 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 piano faculty at the Juilliard School, and serves on the piano faculty at the Bowdoin International Music Festival during the summers. She resides in New York with her husband, pianist Ran Dank, and their two children, Noah and Ella.

Kristin Lee is a violinist of remarkable versatility and impeccable technique who enjoys a vibrant career as a soloist, chamber musician, educator, and artistic director. As a soloist, Lee has appeared with leading orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, Hawai’i Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Ural Philharmonic of Russia, Korean Broadcasting Symphony, Guiyang Symphony Orchestra of China, and Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional of the Dominican Republic. She has performed on the world’s finest concert stages, including those of Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Kennedy Center, Kimmel Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ravinia Festival, the Louvre Museum, the Phillips Collection, and Korea’s Kumho Art Gallery. In addition to her prolific performance career, Lee is on the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music as Assistant Professor of Violin, and she is also the Founding Artistic Director of Emerald City Music (ECM). Her honors include an Avery Fisher Career Grant, top prizes in the Walter W. Naumburg Competition and the Astral Artists National Auditions, and awards from the Trondheim Chamber Music Competition, the Trio di Trieste Premio International Competition, the SYLFF Fellowship, the Dorothy DeLay Scholarship, the Aspen Music Festival’s Violin Competition, the New Jersey Young Artists’ Competition, and the Salon de Virtuosi Scholarship Foundation. Lee’s violin was crafted in Naples in 1759 by Gennaro Gagliano and is generously loaned to her by Paul and Linda Gridley.