Lijia Xie, baritone, is excited to join Areté for his first season! In college, he sang with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum under the direction of Andrew Clark, where he was fortunate to meet his wife, Victoria, and perform 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 served as a Choral Scholar with the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel Choir and also sang with the Chicago Chorale for a season in 2019.

Beyond the classical choral genre, Lijia has developed a broad range of musical interests, including musical theatre and vocal jazz. He has performed in smaller vocal jazz and contemporary a cappella ensembles throughout his life and is also a multi-instrumentalist, having studied alto saxophone, guitar, and classical violin.

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