Photo by Juergen Frank
Nina Lee, cello
Through a public school program, Nina Lee began learning cello in Chesterfield, MO at the age of ten. Six years later, she left home to study with David Soyer at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, PA. She went on to complete her Bachelors and Masters of Music at the Juilliard School in New York City with Joel Krosnick, attended the Tanglewood Music Festival, and toured with the Marlboro Music Festival where she collaborated with Mitsuko Uchida, András Schiff, Felix Galimir, and Samuel Rhodes.
In 1999, Ms. Lee joined the Brentano Quartet with whom she has been privileged to perform throughout North America, Australia, New Zealand, England, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. In addition, she has not only recorded the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but has also championed new music represented in her quartet’s commissioned works of Stephen Hartke, Steven Mackey, Vijay Iyer, James MacMillan, Bruce Adolphe, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Shulamit Ran (to name a few).
Among the various projects the Brentano Quartet has undertaken, it was asked to record the soundtrack to the 2012 film, A Late Quartet, which centered around Beethoven’s Op. 131. The film, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, and Catherine Keener, also featured Ms. Lee playing herself in a cameo.
As important to her life as a musician, Ms. Lee has made a commitment to teaching chamber music. She has been on the faculty at Princeton and Columbia universities and is currently coaching chamber music at the Yale School of Music where the Brentano Quartet is in residence. She has also participated as a guest faculty member at the St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Music Seminar and the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music. She also has made appearances at the Spoleto Festival USA and La Jolla SummerFest.
Ms. Lee makes her home in Brooklyn, New York where she lives with her husband and two children. When she isn’t playing the cello or teaching, she loves spending time with her family, cooking, entertaining, organizing chamber music salons, and finding new ways to be creative!