Song Hee Lee
New Artist of the Month: Soprano Song Hee Lee
By Fred Cohn
Song Hee Lee’s singing, at March’s Met Opera Laffont Competition finals, was brilliant. Small wonder the 28-year-old Seoul-born soprano was named a winner after her tour de force renderings of “Tornami a vagheggiar” from Handel’s Alcina and Ophelia’s mad scene from Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. Both selections were notable for the pinpoint accuracy of her coloratura and the sparkle of her leggiero singing.
It was her maiden appearance at the Met, but she took ownership of stage and auditorium. She was clearly doing exactly what she wanted and exactly where. Lee is a woman who loves to sing.
“My parents tell me that when I was a little child, even before I could speak properly, I was memorizing lyrics and humming tunes,” she tells me in a Zoom interview. “They say I couldn’t keep my mouth shut—which they found kind of fascinating. So they let me take singing lessons, just as a hobby, but I loved it so much that the hobby naturally grew into my passion, and right now it’s my entire life.”
Childhood voice lessons focused on material like “Tomorrow,” from Annie, and the folk song “Shenandoah.” These proved of less interest to her than the aria antica “Caro mio ben.”
“I completely fell in love with it, and I could mimic the style naturally,” she says.
Her first exposure to opera came from a Paris Opera DVD of Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes, featuring Les Arts Florissants and conducted by William Christie—a man who would later play a significant role in Lee’s artistic development. “I was immediately drawn into it,” she says. “The production design, the music, the staging—it felt like Disney’s Fantasia to me. It was like a culture shock: It made me realize how magical the world of opera is.”
Though music was not prevalent in her childhood household, a consciousness of other artforms was. “My father owns a design-related business, and many of my relatives work in the visual arts,” she says. “So maybe that subconsciously helped me focus on artistic accomplishment.” Although they fostered her voice lessons, they did not expect her to become a professional singer, sending her to the liberal arts program at Seoul National University. “They thought I might quit singing and do something else, or maybe just get married,” she says.
In the middle of her second year at university, though, she flew to New York to audition for Juilliard, and got accepted into the Bachelor of Music program. “When I first mentioned that I wanted to move to New York, my parents were like, ‘Absolutely not!’ They weren’t happy. But I persuaded them to let me come sing here, and it all worked out well. But still, up to this day, they joke, ‘You could always come back!’”