Maintaining an active concert schedule in North and South Americas, Europe, and the Far East, award-winning Canadian early keyboardist Sonia Lee has been praised by critics for her "very high standard of playing" and her ability "to dazzle an enraptured audience." She has been heard as soloist at festivals as well as regional and international conferences, including Boston Early Music Festival, Rome Festival, Early Keyboard Music Cycle of Buenos Aires, Early Music Colorado Fall Festival, Society for Historically Informed Performance Summer Concert Series, as well as the American Musical Instrument Society, Midwestern Historical Keyboard Society, Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society, Galpin Society, and International Committee of Musical Instrument Museums and Collections meetings. As a continuo player on both harpsichord and organ, she has collaborated with numerous soloists and ensembles, including Concerto Urbano, La Donna Musicale, the Rome Festival Orchestra and Opera, Dulces Exuviae, Sinfonia da Camera, Les Jeunes Virtuoses de Montréal, and Musicerend Gezelschap, of which she is a founding member.
Sonia Lee's performances have been broadcast on Harmonia/WFIU, WGBH, WILL-FM, RTHK, and CBC/ Radio Canada. Featuring the Seven Psalms of David by Antonia Bembo as well as harpsichord and instrumental works by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, her 2005 CD recording with La Donna Musicale was awarded four stars by Goldberg Magazine. Her recent and upcoming performing projects include CD recordings of the complete keyboard works of Charles Demars and Charles-Alexandre Jollage, as well as concert appearances in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Berlin, Stockholm, Vancouver, Halifax, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.
As a musicologist, she has been devoted to a large-scale research project on rediscovered two-keyboard arrangements of compositions of several eighteenth-century composers, including George Frederic Handel, Georg Christoph Wagenseil, and Johann Christoph Kellner. Collaborating with Michael Tsalka, she is preparing modern editions and recordings, and has delivered modern première performances of these unpublished works. She has contributed biographical articles on Wanda Landowska, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Jean-Pierre Rampal, August Wenzinger, and Lauritz Melchior in the newly published encyclopedia Musicians and Composers of the 20th Century (Salem Press, 2009), and is currently expanding her Doctor of Musical Arts and Library Science Dissertation, The Harpsichord: A Research and Information Guide, in preparation of the publication of her reference book in 2011.
Sonia Lee has won numerous prizes and grants, including top prize in the 2007 Montréal Baroque Galaxie-CBC Rising Star Competition, Jurow Prize in the 2007 Mae & Irving Jurow International Harpsichord Competition, and the 2006 William E. Gribbon Memorial Award sponsored by the American Musical Instrument Society. A Fellow of Trinity College London, she completed her undergraduate and masters studies at McGill University in Montréal, and was awarded fellowships to pursue two doctoral degrees in Early Keyboard Performance and Musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with concurrent studies in Library and Information Science. Her major performance teachers have included Charlotte Mattax, Hank Knox, Luc Beauséjour, and Joyce Lindorff, and she has received additional coaching from Kenneth Gilbert. A past Thesis and Dissertation Reviewer for the School of Music at University of Illinois, she has also taught harpsichord and music history, and directed the Collegium Musicum. She is on the Adjunct Music History Faculty at Illinois Wesleyan University, and currently serves on the Board of Directors and as Newsletter Editor for the Midwestern Historical Keyboard Society.
Keyboard performer Michael Tsalka has won numerous prizes, awards and fellowships in Rome, Bayreuth, Bonn, Paris, Genoa, Calabria, Sardinia, Tel-Aviv, Chicago, Minneapolis, Berlin and Philadelphia. In 2009 he was chosen as Artist-in-Residence to the Anderson Center in Minneapolis, the Ragdale Foundation in Chicago, and the Lions Palace in Berlin. A versatile musician, he performs solo and chamber music repertoire from the Baroque to the Contemporary periods on the modern piano, harpsichord, fortepiano, clavichord and positive organ.
Tsalka was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel. After obtaining a bachelors degree from Tel-Aviv University, he continued studies in Germany and Italy. In 2001 he received a piano solo diploma from the Scuola Superiore Internationale del Trio di Trieste.
From 2002 to 2008, he resided in Philadelphia and studied at Temple University fortepiano and chamber music with Prof. Lambert Orkis, modern piano and piano duo with Prof. Harvey Wedeen, and harpsichord, clavichord and positive organ with Prof. Joyce Lindorff.
Tsalka holds three degrees from that institution: a masters degree in chamber music/accompanying, a masters degree in harpsichord performance, and a doctorate in piano performance.
Prof. Tsalka has performed multiple times throughout Europe, the U.S.A., Canada, Israel, Asia, and Latin America. Recent engagements include the Myra Hess Series in Chicago, the Händelhaus in Halle, Bellas Artes Hall and the Museo Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City, the A. Mozart Fest in Austin, the Hong Kong Baptist University, the Osaka Music Festival in Japan, the Trinity Concert Series in New York, Lila Akademien in Stockholm, Taipei National University, the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota, Concert Hall of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Albacete Piano Festival in Valencia, the Gressoney Festival in Italy, the Friedenauer Concert Series in Berlin, and the Early Keyboard Series in Buenos Aires.
Recent lecture-recitals include presentations for the Magnano International Symposium in Italy, the German Clavichord Society Conclave, the Southeastern and Midwestern Historical Keyboard Societies, Rutgers Musicological Society, the Hong Kong Academy of Arts, the National University and Centro National de las Artes in Mexico City, the Center for Early Keyboard C. Gesualdo in Beunos Aires, Trier Music Festival, Salem College in NC, the University of Iowa, and the Nydahl collection in Stockholm.
Three of his scholarly articles will appear this year in specialized musicological journals: Clavicordio VIII in Italy, the Early Keyboard Journal in the U.S.A, and in the proceedings for the International Conference on the Performance Practice of Western Music (National University of the Arts in Tainan, Taiwan). A committed educator, Tsalka has often been invited to teach as guest professor in Canada, Albania, Germany, Mexico, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Italy, Argentina, Israel, Sweden, New Zealand, and the U.S.A.
Two of his CDs were recently released by the Swedish label, Ljud & Bild. In these, he performs on a Steinway from 1912 and a Lindholm Clavichord from 1808. Tsalka is also recording D.G. Türks 48 keyboard sonatas for NAXOS, and making a critical edition of these unknown works for Artaria Editions in New Zealand.
Currently, Dr. Tsalka performs recitals of re-discovered repertoire for two keyboards with Canadian harpsichordist Sonia Lee. He is Professor of Harpsichord and Chamber Music at the Escuela Superior de Música (National Center for the Arts) in Mexico City. Tsalka is on the board of directors of both the Southeastern and Midwestern Historical Keyboard Societies in the USA. Dr. Tsalka is often invited to judge at piano competitions such as the prestigious Angelica Morales piano Competition in Mexico City.
