CHUI-YEE LEE gave up big money for his music. But he has no regrets. Born in Hong Kong, Lee was packed off by his parents to New York's elite Stuyvesant High School when he was nine. He showed so much talent playing the cello that he was admitted to the Pre-College Division of the prestigious Juilliard School, three years later. He graduated six years after that with three prizes under his belt, but hated the obsession with wunderkinds in the Juilliard community. Lee chose to study economics at Harvard instead, hoping eventually to make a lot of money working for one of the big Wall Street firms. When he graduated, he spent a year in Boston working as a financial consultant - and soon grew bored with it. The cello called. In 1996, Lee made the decision to pursue a serious performing career. He hasn't looked back. Lee will perform an ambitious recital on Saturday with pianist Henri Bonamy, as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. In hindsight, Lee says his banking career was a mere prelude - but an important stage in his development. Initially, he says, it was hard to find a teacher, because at the age of 23, he was considered by some to be too old to study for a solo career. After several months looking around Boston, he got in touch with Laurence Lesser, who agreed to teach him. Lesser had also sacrificed an alternative career for music, having given up the study of mathematics to play the cello. Lee spent two years under Lesser at the New England Conservatory, then went to London, and put himself in the hands of Swedish cellist Frans Helmerson, whom he followed to Madrid and then Cologne, where he is now based. In the meantime, Lee was winning major prizes at the rate of one a year, at the Geneva International Music Competition in 2000, New York's Naumburg International Cello Competition in 2001 and the International Paulo Cello Competition in Helsinki in 2002. This month, he became the first Chinese to win the International Antonio Janigro competition, beating 97 other musicians from 43 countries. Lee says competition is 'the most nerve-wracking experience in your life ... once you have done that, you feel you can handle any kind of situation'. He learnt that competition is not just about playing with precision. 'A competition judge once told me that what's important is the participant's individuality and musicianship rather than technique,' Lee says. 'Many people can play like a note-perfect machine, but few have the courage, intelligence and willingness to do something that represents themselves.' Lee may not have had a meteoric rise in the international concert circuit, but he's enjoying himself, with an evolving career in Europe. He plays about 15 concerts a year and appears often in chamber-music performances with musicians such as the cellist Mario Brunello - with whom Lee performed in a small church in Tuscany at sunset - and violinists Ivry Gitlis and Giuliano Carmignola. For his Saturday recital at the Hong Kong City Hall, he is scheduled to play less well-known works such as Gasper Cassado's Suite For Cello Solo and a piece by composer Joyce Tang Wai-chung. His more mainstream selections include sonatas by Brahms and Strauss, Schumann's Adagio And Allegro In A Flat Minor and Bartok's Rhapsody For Cello And Piano. Although he has been relatively late in getting on the right track in life, Lee doesn't regret his five-year 'gap' in Boston. 'To be a musician, you have to live life,' he says. 'There is no substitute for that. And those five years have added a lot to my life experience. Only when I became tired of other things did I begin to know what I wanted. 'If I had not gone through those five years, I would still have been scratching my head and asking myself: 'What if ...?'' Chui-yee Lee Cello Recital, Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall, Central. Sat, 8pm. $100-$200 Urbtix. Tel: 2111 5999, or go to www.hk.artsfestival.org