Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg is one of the most today's most important living composers.  From 2009-2012 he served as the Mary & James G. Wallach Composer-in-Residence for the New York Philharmonic.  We recorded this conversation at the end of his tenure there in preparation for an upcoming CD release and national broadcast.

Interview with composer Magnus Lindberg, 2012

Angus Lee (b.1992) is one of the foremost performer-composers of his generation. Born and raised in Hongkong, Lee has appeared at international music festivals across Asia, central Europe and North America in his capacities as flautist, composer and conductor. He completed his studies at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (2010-14) and the Royal Academy of Music (2014-16) with the highest honours, with his studies fully supported financially by the Aedas Scholarship and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Music & Dance Fund.

Lee was by training a conductor, and is recognised as one of Hongkong's leading performers in contemporary music. Since 2016 he has been a core musician of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, and has worked in close quarters with, among others, Hingyan Chan, Unsuk Chin, Brett Dean, Du Yun, Toshio Hosokawa and Zhu Shirui, partaking in the regional and world premieres of their works. Most significantly, Lee has performed as soloist in Pierre Boulez's Mémoriale ( ... explosante-fixe ... Originel) at the composer's 90th birthday concert series (2015) and memorial concert (2016) at the Lucerne Festival. He has also stepped in at short notice at the Hong Kong premiere of composer Eugene Birman's multimedia music theatre, "The Once and Future" (2023), performing in the Berlin Philharmonic's ZeMu! Ensemble Berlin. Lee's recording of Camilo Mendez's solo flute music was also released in 2024 on the composer's monograph, released by the Austrian new music label, KAIROS.

As a composer, Lee was largely autodidactic, but has benefited, in particular, from the tutelage of composers Franck Bedrossian, Oscar Bianchi, Frédéric Durieux, Dimitri Papageorgiou, Philippe Manoury, Isabel Mundry, Yann Robin, and Johannes Schöllhorn at international composition academies. While his earlier works focused largely on the notion of 'virtuosity' and the relationship between notation and realisation, his recent works demonstrate a persistent interest in exploration different forms of musical temporality; his works have been performed by the likes of Ensemble Intercontemporain (FR), Ensemble Modern (DE), Ensemble Multilatérale (FR), HereNowHear (US), Klangforum Wien (AT), Kollektiv Totem (CH), the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Trio Accanto, and the Subaerial Collective (US). In 2022, Lee's first opera, Chasing Waterfalls, received its world premiere at Germany's Semperoper Dresden to critical acclaim; the work subsequently toured back to Hong Kong's New Vision Arts Festival to equally enthusiastic reception. The year 2024 saw the premiere of Des flammes... (2023-24), created for the HK Philharmonic's Robert Ho Hong Kong Composers Scheme, and ... aux cendres (2024), created under the baton of Elim Chan.

Lee is equally in demand as a conductor, largely though not exclusively focused on new music. He was one of the conducting fellows at Ensemble Modern's 10th International Composers and Conductors Seminar, studying under Stefan Asbury. He has additionally worked with Ensemble Suono Giallo, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Musikfabrik. the Hong Kong New Music Enasemble and the Neu Vocalsolisten Stuttgart at the ilSUONO Contemporary New Music Week (2016), Ticino Musica Festival (2018, 2022), the Frankfurt ...cresc... Biennale for Actual Music (2023) and the ECLAT Festival for New Music Stuttgart (2024), premiering the works by emerging fellow young composers. He has also stepped in at short notice to lead the Asian premiere of Michel van de Aa's music theatre, "The Book of Water" at the 2023 Hong Kong Arts Festival. In 2024, he led for the first time the University of Hong Kong's University Philharmonic, performing Bernstein's Candide Overture and Shostakovich's Symphony no.5 in D minor to popular acclaim.

A holder of the Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music (LRAM), Lee is currently serving as a full-time assistant lecturer at The University of Hong Kong's Music Department, coordinating all of the Department's performance courses in addition to teaching elementary music theory, conducting, chamber music, as well as supervising an undergraduate level capstone practice-based research course. He also teaches woodwind chamber music at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. He has also served as flute faculty at the Lucerne Festival Academy in 2022 and 2023.

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Interview with composer Magnus Lindberg, 2012

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