Angus Lee is a versatile musician equally at home as a soloist, chamber, ensemble and orchestral musician. Named Young Music Maker by the Radio Television Hong Kong in 2012, Lee’s dynamic and engaging performances have earned him critical acclaims local and abroad.

Considered a specialist in new music interpretation, Lee received his training at the London Sinfonietta Academy (2016) and the prestigious Lucerne Festival Academy (2013, 15, 16) with musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Most significantly, Lee was nominated as soloist at Lucerne Festival Academy founder Pierre Boulez’s 90th Birthday Celebration Concert series in 2015, performing Mémoriale (... explosante-fixe... Originel). He was invited to reprise the performance in Easter 2016 at the composer’s memorial concert, with the Lucerne Festival Alumni Orchestra under Matthias Pintscher.

Since his return to Hong Kong in 2016 and joining the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Lee has performed and toured internationally, performing regional and world première of works by, among others, Unsuk Chin, Brett Dean, Du Yun & Toshio Hosokawa. Lee is also an active soloist and chamber musician, having been invited to perform at Tai Kwun’s «Laundry Steps» lunchtime concerts (2019, 2020), Tom Lee Music’s livestream concerts (2020 & 2021), as well as the Leisure & Cultural Services Department’s «Our Music Talents» (2018) and «City Hall Virtuosi» (2023) series. He is also inaugural artist at HKU MUSE’s «Around Twilight» (2021) lecture demonstration series at the height of COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, at the invitation of violinist-conductor Stanley Dodds, he stepped in at short notice to perform with Berliner Philharmoniker’s ZeMu! Ensemble in Eugene Birman’s The Once and Future at New Vision Arts Festival 2023.  

Lee currently serves as assistant lecturer at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Music, teaching both flute performance and chamber music. He is also a part-time woodwind chamber music faculty at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Concurrently, he serves as flute faculty of the Lucerne Festival Academy from 2022 - 23.

As a composer, Lee initially received tuition from Hau-yee Ng and Maurice Poon, but turned to studying composition on an auto-didactic basis until 2016. Since then, Lee has been invited to a number of international composition academies, studying under the tutelage of some of the leading composers today, including Franck Bedrossian, Oscar Bianchi, Frédéric Durieux, Philippe Manoury, and Yann Robin.

By training an instrumentalist, Lee’s earlier compositions largely focused on challenging the perceived limits of instrumental virtuosity. Since 2019, Lee’s interests turned towards exploring the function of repetition in conjunction with temporality, examining the nexus of elements informing our temporal experience of music. His works have been performed by leading international new music groups, including, among others, Ensemble Intercontemporain (Fr), Ensemble Modern (De), Ensemble Multilatérale (Fr), and Klangforum Wien (At), showcased at festivals such as ACL Asian Music Festival (Jp), Festival Musica Strasbourg (Fr), ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week (It), IRCAM ManiFeste (Fr), outHEAR New Music Week (Gr), Seoul International Computer Music Festival (Kr) and Ticino Musica Festival (Ch).

The year 2022 also saw the world première of Lee’s first opera, Chasing Waterfalls, commissioned by the Berlin-based phase.7 performing arts group and co-created with the sound art collective klingklangklong, at Germany’s renowned Semperoper Dresden, with its subsequent Asian première at Hong Kong's New Vision Arts Festival. Lee led the performances on both occasions as conductor. Most recently, Lee was named one of the composers of the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s Robert N. H. Ho Family Foundation Composers’ Scheme, mentored by composer Christian Mason. As part of the scheme, Lee will create a new work for the orchestra, to be premièred in May 2024.

Lee is currently pursuing doctoral studies in composition at the University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Chan Hing-yan and Prof. Giorgio Biancorosso.