Earl Lee was a twenty-four-year-old cellist on the rise when the middle finger of his left hand started curling sharply when he pressed the strings of his instrument. He was diagnosed with “focal dystonia,” a neurological disorder sometimes dubbed “musicians’ cramp.”
A recent Juilliard grad, Lee had been determined to play professionally since elementary school. When treatments (including acupuncture in his native Korea) and attempts to “retrain” his fingers showed little improvement, he despaired. Friends suggested that he go to business school or, since he liked to cook, train as a chef.
“My head was exploding,” Lee recalls. But after months of anguished indecision, he kept returning to “how much I loved music, how much I loved to perform.” Finally, he called his mother and announced he was moving in a new direction: he would conduct.
In 2011, about two years after his diagnosis, Lee enrolled in the master’s program in conducting at the Manhattan School of Music. He graduated in 2013, and again his star rose quickly: In 2015, he began a three-year stint as resident conductor at the Toronto Symphony and artistic director and conductor of its youth symphony. In 2018, he received the biannual Heinz Unger Award as “Canada’s most promising emerging young conductor” and started a three-year appointment as associate director of the Pittsburgh Symphony.
Last year, Lee accepted a two-year appointment as assistant conductor for the Boston Symphony—and this past June, he was selected from more than 225 applicants as the fourteenth music director of the Ann Arbor Symphony.
—
Lee, who turns thirty-nine this month, signs on to Zoom interviews from an apartment he rents near E. Stadium Blvd. Since the A2SO season started in September, he’s been flying in every month for a week or ten days from New York City, where he lives with his wife, New York Philharmonic flutist Yoobin Son, and their two-year-old daughter.
Soft-spoken and friendly, Lee wears a gray hoodie in both interviews, a contrast to his elegant appearance on the podium. On the second interview, he looks visibly fatigued. It’s two days before the A2SO’s November concert; he’s been rehearsing every afternoon.
Lee’s predecessor, the well-liked Arie Lipsky, left in 2019 after almost twenty years at the helm. Last season, six finalists auditioned for the job by conducting the orchestra for an evening performance.
Lee’s concert closed out the competition in April. That same week, he was announced as the winner of the 2022 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award. It comes with a $30,000 cash prize and what the Solti Foundation refers to as “industry connections,” but he chose to stay in the running in Ann Arbor.
When the symphony offered him the position, “I didn’t hesitate,” he says. “I felt we just kind of clicked right with the very first rehearsal.”
A2SO executive director Sarah Calderini says Lee’s personality, as well as his musical “brilliance,” bowled her over. “I couldn’t ask for a better partner,” she says, as the symphony rebuilds its finances and audience after the pandemic. “He’s a very kind, funny, humble man.”
Violinist and associate concertmaster Kathryn Votapek wasn’t performing the night he auditioned, but says she “heard from everybody ‘This guy is magnificent,’” an opinion she came to share.
“It’s really been a joy making music with him,” Votapek says. “He draws something special from the orchestra.”
The symphony’s November 11 concert opened with the piano concerto “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” by post-minimalist composer John Coolidge Adams. A New Yorker reviewer called it a “fun-house-mirror distortion of Henry Mancini’s ‘Peter Gunn’ riff,” with complex rhythms and changing keys.
“It’s possibly the most difficult piece the orchestra has ever played,” Votapek says. “We were counting and concentrating.”
Lee “was very clear with all his instructions and gestures. He was like an air traffic controller. If he hadn’t been as clear as he was, there could have been a crash.”
—
The only child of an engineer and a piano teacher, Lee grew up in the city of Yeosu, South Korea. He started piano lessons with his mother when he was five but quickly gravitated to the cello after learning to play in school.
When he was in third or fourth grade, he recalls, his teacher asked who would be interested in entering a regional competition. His hand shot up instantly.
His parents, he says, were “completely shocked” that he began getting up early to practice. He won the competition and told them that he had found his career.
His parents committed themselves to making it happen. Feeling he would have better opportunities elsewhere, they moved to Canada when he was eleven, first to Vancouver and then Toronto. At sixteen, he moved to the U.S., earning a bachelor’s in cello performance at the Curtis Institute and a master’s at Juilliard in 2007. Then came focal dystonia and his career change to conducting.
The Solti Award may have sealed the deal for the A2SO. “Of course, I am delighted,” says Lee, “but it is humbling.” He says the recognition will push him to work harder at the art of conducting.
This season, he’s conducting pieces selected before his arrival, but as music director, he is already planning the 2023–2024 season. It’s a collaborative venture, he emphasizes, as others weigh in, including Calderini and the board of directors.
The program won’t be announced until next spring, but Lee says that besides the “incredible masterpieces” of giants like Beethoven, the symphony will continue its tradition of performing work by living composers. “That’s the only way we can guarantee the future of music,” he says.
In addition to Ann Arbor, Lee has conducting gigs this season in New York, Boston, Honolulu, San Francisco, Toronto, and Edmonton. Between their busy schedules and scattered commitments, he and Son frequently miss each other’s performances, especially since their daughter was born; while planning the A2SO’s November performances, Lee was making calls about day care.
Family life has its compensations: to the delight of her musical parents, their daughter loves to sing with them.
—
This article has been edited since it was published in the December 2022 Ann Arbor Observer. The description of the Heinz Unger award has been corrected.
