Yura Lee

violin/viola

Yura Lee is a multifaceted musician, both as a soloist and chamber musician and as one of the very few who’s equally virtuosic on both the violin and viola. Her career spans various musical mediums. She’s known for captivating audiences with a repertoire that ranges from the baroque to the modern era, and she enjoys a nearly three-decades-long career that takes her around the world.

Lee has performed with major orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles and New York philharmonics, and Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco symphony orchestras. She’s given recitals in London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, Salzburg’s Mozarteum, Brussels’s Palais des Beaux-Arts, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. At the age of 12, she became the youngest artist to receive the Debut Artist of the Year prize at National Public Radio’s Performance Today awards. She’s also the recipient of a 2007 Avery Fisher Career Grant and numerous international prizes, including top prizes in the Mozart, Indianapolis, Hannover, Kreisler, Bashmet, and Paganini competitions. Lee was the only first-prize winner awarded across four categories at the 2013 ARD International Music Competition in Germany. Her CD Mozart in Paris, with Reinhard Goebel and the Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie, received the prestigious Diapason d’Or award.

As a chamber musician, Lee’s regular engagements include the Seattle Chamber Music Society, the Marlboro Music Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the Verbier Festival, the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest, and Caramoor, among others. She frequently appears with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York City, as both violinist and violist, and she’s a member of the Boston Chamber Music Society.

Lee plays a fine Giovanni Grancino violin kindly loaned to her through the Beare’s International Violin Society by generous sponsors. For viola, she plays an instrument made in 2002 by Douglas Cox, who resides in Vermont.

Yura Lee is a professor at the USC Thornton School of Music, where she holds the Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld Endowed Chair. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Nugget, and spends most of her free time in the Pacific Northwest.