Lee made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1996, and earned music degrees from the Juilliard School and Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University.
Like the romantic sweep of a Rachmaninoff concerto, Marian Lee's passion for music is visionary, powerful, and awe-inspiring.
One of the busiest classical pianists in the Quad Cities, the friendly, impressive Michigan native is pumped to be presenting her first solo concert for the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's Up Close chamber series, held in conjunction with International Piano Day on March 29. The wide-ranging program will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the lobby of the Figge Art Museum (225 West Second Street, Davenport).
QCSO executive director Brian Baxter noted that Lee has been a chamber-series fixture for several years, playing diverse works with many QCSO musicians. "This will be her first solo recital in the series,” he said recently, “and we're thrilled to showcase her incredible talent and thoughtfully curated program for the QC community.”
"I am very excited about this March Up Close concert," Lee said in a recent interview from her studio at St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center, where she's a professor and music department chair. The QCSO chamber music series is led by concertmaster Naha Greenholtz and was formerly called Signature Series.
Greenholtz and Lee separately moved to the QC the same year (in fall 2012), and did their first chamber program together in March 2013 at the Figge. "It was great because we were both new to the Quad Cities and it was exciting to be part of this series," Lee said.
"From our first rehearsal, I knew that I was about to be spoiled to be able to partner with such an imaginative and sensitive pianist," Greenholtz said by e-mail. "Our rehearsals feel like we are meeting to figure out how to breathe the music together and bounce ideas off each other. Marian speaks about the music beautifully and her concert energy is contagious. Performing with her is pure fun!"
While the Figge lobby has been a popular venue for Up Close, the QCSO has moved it around to different places, including last September, when the violinist and pianist performed in the auditorium at the Watts-Midtown branch of the Rock Island Public Library, in a program of Sergei Prokofiev, George Gershwin, and Angel Lam.
"I'm just grateful to be able to play chamber music on a high level," Lee said, adding that she equally adores chamber, solo, and concerto performing.
"I love solo, where I can choose my program," she said. "I like that freedom to do what I want. If I want to slow down here or speed up there, I can. I don't have to work it out with others. [But] I love playing chamber music because I love collaboration. I love feeling the energy of the other person. A concerto with orchestra is like chamber music on steroids.
"My program has a lot of composers from all over the world," Lee said of the upcoming Up Close. "I like variety in my programs."
In addition to standard repertory such as J.S. Bach, Beethoven, and Rachmaninoff, in the new concert she will play several contemporary pieces: Reena Esmail's Crystal Preludes from 2020, Gabriela Lena Frank's Hymne Inca from 2000, and Kadisha Onalbayeva's Alla from the 2019 documentary Muse of Dior.
Perhaps most meaningfully, the concert will feature a world premiere by her friend Bill Campbell, who taught at SAU for 18 years, and is now music-department chair and director of competition studies at Linfield University in Oregon (where he started in fall 2023). "It is beautiful," Lee said of the new piece Beyond Mountains.
Campbell plans to attend the March 29 concert. In a recent e-mail, he said that while working with Lee at SAU, "I got to know how much she genuinely cares for her students and everyone she works with. The first time I heard her play piano, I was impressed by her musicality and technique. I still am," Campbell said, noting he loved writing a new piece for her as a friend, reflecting her many attributes.
"I hope that it expresses aspects of resiliency and perseverance and graceful beauty," he said. "The music incorporates electronics with the solo piano, and some extended techniques inside the instrument."
Over the years, the Up Close series has featured many modern works, including compositions by Amy Beach and Angel Lam. Lee said that with “each person who presents Up Close, I feel it reflects their personality. For mine, I have a strong foundation. I love the traditional classics, but I have a side that likes contemporary music and doing crazy things, like Cowell and Cage."
"I have a lot of balls in the air. I've been doing a lot of performing," the pianist said of her packed, busy career.
Traveling the World on Piano
Last November, Lee played at the University of Chile in Santiago as part of a festival, gave a master class, and judged a piano competition.
In February, she appeared in a festival at the University of Mobile in Alabama and was the jury chair for the Gulf Coast Steinway Society competition, also giving a concert and master class. One of her friends – pianist and composer Kadisha Onalbayeva – runs that competition and is president of the society. Lee will perform one of her works at the March 29 concert.
Lee made her concert debut in high school performing with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and Flint Symphony Orchestra in Michigan. She entered the Juilliard School as a scholarship student, receiving a Bachelor of Music under the guidance of Gyorgy Sandor, whose own piano professor was Bela Bartok at the Liszt Academy in Hungary and is the author On Piano Playing: Motion, Sound, & Expression, a staple in the piano pedagogy literature.
Lee continued on at Juilliard to receive a master’s degree in piano performance with Seymour Lipkin, winner of the prestigious Rachmaninoff Competition and artistic director of Kneisel Hall Chamber Festival. Subsequently, she was awarded the coveted Fulbright Grant to study with Naum Shtarkman, a Tchaikovsky competition laureate, at the Moscow Conservatory in what was then the Soviet Union.
During her three-year stay, Lee witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and toured extensively within the former USSR. Upon her return to the U.S., Lee completed her doctoral degree at the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University.
She made her New York City debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 1996 as winner of the Artists International Award and has appeared as soloist and with orchestra internationally in Chile, Austria, Belgium, Italy, France, Norway, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Poland, Brazil, Byelorussia, Estonia, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Lee has also played Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall and Rachmaninoff Hall, and the Hermitage Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Locally, Lee's recent professional activities include performing the Bach F minor Concerto and Mozart Concerto No. 21 with the QCSO, Beethoven Concerto #3 with the Clinton Symphony, and Tchaikovsky Concerto #1 with the Muscatine Symphony Orchestra.
Lee has the honor of being the first female solo pianist to perform on Iowa Public Radio’s Steinway Café, in 2021, which is available to watch at YouTube.com/watch?v=c0pH88JU8Ig. And this May, she will travel to Novi Sad, Serbia to perform, teach, and lecture at the World Piano Conference.
Joy of Teaching
Lee teaches about 35 students regularly. She co-founded the Quad City Piano Ensemble Festival four years ago. It's held each April to encourage students of all levels of FMTA teachers to play duets, duos, trios, quartets, and concertos, and to expose students and their families to the rare and historic Pleyel double grand piano at Bettendorf's Asbury Methodist Church.
This year, the festival will take place on April 26, the event including a morning guest artist presentation, a master class, a 3 p.m. student concert, and a 7 p.m. guest artist concert by the Unison Duo from Luther College.
Lee played Debussy's challenging masterpiece L'isle joyeuse on the Pleyel for its grand-opening concert in January 2019. She was on the restoration committee for the double grand piano – with two facing keyboards, one of just seven remaining in the world, and the only playable Pleyel double grand in the Western Hemisphere. (Lee explains the Pleyel at YouTube.com/watch?v=g4vdaRlyuMA.)
"I just love watching their growth," Lee said of those she teaches. "Each student is individual. Trying to figure out how to reach and talk to these students is always the challenge and joy. It's very satisfying every year to see them improve."
She also established a summer SAU piano camp, which started in 2017. Lee grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and attended the famed Interlochen summer music program several years. "I wanted something like that in the Quad Cities," she said. "Just being able to have kids who study piano – because piano is such a lonely instrument. You're by yourself. It's not like band or choir.
"Summer is a perfect time to have a camp, have these kids become friends and just support each other," Lee said. "They're from all different studios and it has grown so kids are coming from different parts of the state – Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Des Moines."
SAU's piano camp lasts one week and Lee said the students (a maximum of 16 entering grades 8-12) become fast friends. This year, the camp will be held the week of July 14, and activities at SAU's Galvin Fine Arts Center and McCarthy Hall include daily lessons, a performance seminar, a specialty piano class, music theory, improvisation, and piano ensemble class where students can play duets with their fellow pianists, Students also enjoy have non-musical activities, and the camp culminates with a concert.
As part of the free, monthly "Casual Classics" series in Galvin’s Madsen Hall, Lee will also perform with clarinetist Rob Miller on April 25, 5 p.m.-7 p.m.
Tickets for the Figge Art Museum's March 29 Up Close with Marian Lee are $31 for adults and $13 for students, and are available at QCSO.org/event/up-close-with-marian-lee.
