Angus Lee (b. 1992) is a Hongkong-based flautist, composer, conductor and educator.
FLUTE
© HKU MUSE
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 reprised 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. More recently, Lee’s performance of Camilo Mendez’s solo and chamber music for flute was released as part of the composer’s monograph album, Distant Fragments, by the Austrian new music specialist label, KAIROS.
Lee has served as assistant lecturer at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Music since 2022, spearheading the Department’s performance programme. He also teaches woodwind chamber music at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and has served, between 2022-23, as flute faculty of the Lucerne Festival Academy.
For upcoming activities, visit SCHEDULE.
COMPOSITION
© Hong Kong Sinfonietta; with composer-curator Samson Young.
As a composer, Lee initially received tuition from Hau-yee Ng and Maurice Poon, but turned to studying composition on an autodidactic 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, among others, Franck Bedrossian, Oscar Bianchi, Frédéric Durieux, Toshio Hosokawa, Philippe Manoury, Christian Mason, Isabel Mundry, Yann Robin, and Johannes Schöllhorn.
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).
Recent years have seen Lee’s creative output shift towards larger-scale musical genres, including, in 2022, the world première of Lee’s first opera, Chasing Waterfalls (co-commissioned by the phase7 performing.arts and New Vision Arts Festival Hong Kong, with electronics created by klingklangklong), at Germany’s renowned Semperoper Dresden. The year 2024 also saw the première of Lee’s first orchestral work, Des flammes… [study for orchestra], as part of the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s Robert H. N. Ho Hong Kong Composer’s Scheme; Lee was subsequently awarded a second commission by the Hong Kong Philharmonic, for which he created … aux cendres [study II for orchestra], which was premièred recently by the orchestra under Elim Chan. The 2024/25 will see the premiere of his solo piano piece Anamorphologia (2024) by Hongkong pianist Kent Fu; hic / nunc (2024-25), commissioned by and written for the Music Biennale Zagreb and premiered jointly by the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and Ensemble Sonora Vertixe; and a new work for two pianos (2025), to be premiered by Hongkong pianists Stephen Hung and Kent Fu.
Lee is currently pursuing doctoral studies in composition at the University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Chan Hing-yan and Prof. Giorgio Biancorosso.
For more, visit COMPOSITION PORTFOLIO.
CONDUCTING
© Bobby Yip
Lee received his training in conducting principally from Alan Cumberland (HKAPA) and Sian Edwards (RAM). He has also studied briefly with Charles Peebles and James Judd at the Orkney Conductor’s Course and the Asian Youth Orchestra Conducting Masterclasses. However, Lee retains a strong focus on the performance of contemporary music, having worked closely with musicians of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and the NOVA Ensemble on multiple occasions, leading the regional and world première of works by local and international composers.
In 2020, Lee was selected as one of the conducting fellows of Ensemble Modern’s inaugural edition of International Composer & Conductor Seminar, where he studied and rehearsed the new pieces Gewalt der Musik (2022) and Panorama (2022) by composers Pyotr Peszat and Philipp Krebs, under the supervision of conductor Stefan Asbury; the première concert took place at the 2023 edition of festival cresc... [Biennale for Current Music Frankfurt Rhein main]. In the same year, Lee also stepped in at short notice to lead the Asian première the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s ‘chamber music theatre’ work, The Book of Water (2021 - 22) at the Hong Kong Arts Festival; he also debut with the renowned Ensemble Musikfabrik (De) and the Neue Vocalsolisten (De) at the International Young Composers Academy Ticino (founded by composer Oscar Bianchi), premièring 10 new works by course participants. He also returned to Germany in January 2024, leading Ensemble Modern in the opening concert of Stuttgart’s Eclat Festival for New Music. More recently, Lee made his first appearance with HKU’s University Philharmonic Orchestra, performing Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony no.5 in D minor.
Lee leads a course in conducting as part of HKU Music Department’s Performance Study programme.
For upcoming activities, visit SCHEDULE.