Lijia Xie, baritone, is excited to be joining Areté for his first season! In college, he sang with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum under the direction of Andrew Clark, where he was lucky enough to meet his wife Victoria and sing solos in Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Howells’ Requiem, and other works. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Lijia participated as a Choral Scholar with the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel Choir, and also previously sang with the Chicago Chorale for a season in 2019.

Aside from the classical choral genre, Lijia has nurtured a wide range of interests including musical theatre and vocal jazz, with experience in smaller vocal jazz and contemporary a cappella ensembles throughout his life, and also as a multi-instrumentalist, having studied alto saxophone, guitar, and classical violin.

In his professional life, Lijia currently works as a machine learning engineer on search and recommendations at Reverb, an online marketplace for musical instruments and subsidiary of Etsy; he also recently completed training in pastoral ministry, theology, and philosophy of religion through an MDiv at UChicago’s Divinity School. He looks forward to continuing to weave together the many threads of his personal and professional life here in sunny Southern California.