Honours Programme: Violin Masterclasses Oct 22

The Music Circle’s Honours Programme students will participate in two Masterclasses being held in October 2022. This is the fourth masterclass for this Honours cohort.

The participants will have the opportunity to refine their pieces and technique as they prepare to perform in the Honours Recital on 29 October 22, to be held at MusoSpace.

Violinist Chin Chee Mee is director of Singapore’s Forte Musicademy. A graduate of both the Peabody Conservatory of Music and University of Massachusetts in Amherst USA, she holds a Masters Degree in violin performance.

Chee Mee is a strong advocate of chamber music education for young music students. Under her direction, the Forte Camerata, a chamber ensemble made up of students from Forte Musicademy, has won top prizes in chamber music competitions, and has been invited to perform locally including multiple editions of ChildAid, and inclusive community concerts overseas.

As a pedagogue, Chee Mee is widely credited with building the Gifted Young Violinist programme at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts from the ground up as NAFA’s deputy head of the School of Young Talents, a position she relinquished after 10 years to co-found Forte Musicademy in 2010. Her students have consistently won top prizes in violin competitions and coveted placements in prestigious institutions, including Royal College of Music in London UK, and Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore.

Chee Mee performs as a freelance violinist with various Singapore orchestras and ensembles. She has also curated and performed in recitals featuring chamber works and neglected solo repertoire of the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern periods.

Violinist Lynette Lim is a well-known pedagogue based in Singapore, whose students count among the best in the local music scene. She has produced 8 concertmasters and principals of the Singapore National Youth Orchestra in the last decade. Many of her students are also concertmasters of their school orchestras, leading them to win numerous Gold-with-Honours awards over the years.

Lynette holds a Master of Music (with distinction) from Indiana University, USA, where she studied with the legendary Professor Emeritus, Josef Gingold. She was a teaching assistant to Professor Sylvia Rosenberg at the Eastman School of Music, USA, where she was awarded the Performer’s Certificate with the Bachelor of Music Degree.

She has been featured in solo and chamber music concerts throughout the USA, as well as in Germany and Japan. She has collaborated with conductor Dennis Russell Davies at the Aspen Music Festival, and was invited by Gunter Schuller and Louis Krasner to be a Fellow at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood. Upon her return to Singapore, she was instrumental in setting up the String Department at the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts and had been the Co-ordinator of Strings at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.