Tzu-En Lee, violin

Violinist Tzu-En Lee was born in Tainan, Taiwan, where she began studying violin when she was only five years of age. From ages seven to seventeen, she won numerous local and national competitions, foremost of which was the Taiwan National Violin Competition. At the local level, she won the Tainan County and City Competitions, the Kao-Hsiung County and City (2008) Competitions, the Kao-Hsiung City Gun-Du-Bae Competition (1998), and the Yunlin County Competition. She studied in the Music Department of the Tainan University of Technology, where she was the principal second violin in the school’s orchestra, conducted by Huei-Ming Twu.

Since coming to the United States, Tzu-En Lee has studied violin performance at Mannes College, The New School for Music, in Manhattan. She graduated with a diploma in the Spring of 2012 and is currently pursuing further studies in the graduate program at Mannes under the tutelage of violinist Yuri Vodovoz. She is a member of the Mannes Community Orchestra, playing first violin, second stand. In addition to her studies, Ms. Lee has enjoyed taking part in the musical life of NYC as a free-lance musician. Since the founding in 2009 of the Pocket Opera of New York, she has performed with its orchestra on two productions (Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutti” and Handel’s “Messiah”), under the artistic leadership of its conductor Wei-En Hsu. Violinist Tzu-En Lee has also sought out opportunities for performing music by contemporary composers. She has participated in the Second and Third Annual Social Networking Concerts, produced and curated by American composer Douglas Townsend at Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan. (In the 2011 concert she was part of an ensemble led by pianist David Oei which performed a new piano reduction of Townsend’s triple violin concerto. In the 2012 concert she was part of a string quartet which included violinist Muneyoshi Takahashi and which world-premiered a work by Australian composer Houston Dunleavy. Both performances were audio podcast and videotaped for YouTube.)