A prediction: Canberra could become a world centre in Mozart studies. It is already well on the way with the recent appointment of the American-Chinese pianist and early music specialist Mike Lee to its newly rejuvenated faculty at the Australian National University’s School of Music.

^{Mike Cheng-Yu Lee. Photograph © Peter Hislop}

Mike Cheng-Yu Lee arrived in Canberra in mid-July to take up positions as Lecturer in Piano/Keyboard Studies and Director of ANU’s Keyboard Institute.  He came to Canberra with his wife, Ji Young Kim, also a pianist-scholar, who is an Associate Lecturer at the ANU.

Before this, Lee served as Visiting Assistant Professor on the staff of the largest music school in North America, at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has an impressive and lustrous resumé. He studied at Yale and was a lecturer in music theory there. He holds a PhD in Musicology from Cornell University where he was awarded the Donald J.Grout Memorial Dissertation Prize. His teachers have included Malcolm Bilson, Boris Berman and the renowned Haydn scholar James Webster.

In 2011, Lee was awarded Second Prize and the Audience Prize at the International Fortepiano...