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Pei-Shan Lee

Division: College

Department: Faculty, Collaborative Piano

Instrument: Piano

Pianist Pei-Shan Lee's playing has been praised in Strad Magazine as "glittering, sensuous, tender, and luminous." The Boston Musical Intelligencer highlights her "gorgeous tone and color range, and 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, including performances at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Jordan Hall in Boston, and Severance Hall in Cleveland. Internationally, she has performed across Belgium, France, Germany, Finland, Israel, Taiwan, and China. Her festival appearances include Mostly Mozart, Caramoor, Great Lakes, Rockport, Bowdoin, the Brussels Cello Festival, ProQuartet in Paris, 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, New York, San Diego, Toronto, and Munich. In addition to collaborating with her esteemed NEC colleagues, she has appeared in duo recitals with violinists Catherine Cho, Jacques Israelievitch, Stefan Jackiw, Ani Kavafian, Ayano Ninomiya, and Ian Swensen; violists Brian Chen, Edward Gazouleas, Kim Kashkashian, and Dimitri Murrath; and cellists Lluís Claret, Andrés Diaz, Paul Katz, and Pieter Wispelwey, among many others.

A collaborative piano faculty member at NEC, Lee also curates the Sonata Night series and helped develop NEC’s five-year dual degree program (BM in Piano Performance / MM in Collaborative Piano). In 2013, she launched the master’s collaborative piano program at California State University Northridge, and in 2015 created the collaborative piano fellowship at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, where she directs the program in the summers. Her doctoral thesis, The Collaborative Pianist: Balancing Roles in Partnership, is a widely referenced resource in higher education.

Based in Boston, she has worked closely with Boston Ballet and guest artists of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and participated in the documentary films The Portrait (featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter) and Talent Has Hunger (featuring Paul Katz and his cello studio at NEC). She was appointed violinist Itzhak Perlman’s studio pianist at the Perlman Music Program and subsequently joined the faculty for PMP’s Sarasota Winter Residency. Her former appointments include positions at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Meadowmount School of Music, and the Chautauqua Institution. Lee was also a founding member of DC8, the Da Camera Society’s new music ensemble in Los Angeles.

Lee’s live performances have been broadcast on WQXR, WGBH, WRCJ, and the Violin Channel. Her recording of the Strauss and Szymanowski sonatas with violinist Grzegorz Kotow is available on the ArchiMusic label. She earned her degrees under the guidance of Irma Vallecillo, Anne Epperson, Jonathan Feldman, Samuel Sanders, and Solomon Mikowsky in the U.S., and Yu-Yun Chen, Su-Chen Kuo, and Song-Ren Hsu in Taiwan.

Affiliated Departments and Programs

Collaborative Piano