Super Eco

Photo credit: Soyeon Lee

Our family loves our piano teacher. Last year, she drove to our house for a block of lessons with literally every member of our five-member household—talk about lowering our carbon footprint! She's pretty eco-savvy herself, organizing the Rock the Wells benefit to harness the power of music for building 56 water wells via UNICEF for the people of Somaliland, a small country bordering Ethiopia.

Maybe eco-activism runs in the profession. Take classical pianist Soyeon Lee. Last year, Lee presented Re!nvented, the first-ever classical eco-concert to which she wore a Nina Valenti gown made from more than 6,000 juice pouches collected through the TerraCycle-Honest Tea Brigade school program.

Now, Lee is teaming up with TerraCycle to release the post-concert album, Re!nvented, in eco-friendly recycled packaging. Re!nvented CD cases are made from recycled chip bags collected from millions of school children. The eco-friendly cases stand in for the usual PVC packaging, a petrochemical-based plastic that is difficult to recycle and has been linked to cancer.

Re!nvented was recorded at Carnegie Hall in February 2008. The first half of Lee's program featured a performance of the first book of Iberia by the Albeniz and seventh sonata by Prokofiev. Then, in her designer juice pouch gown and in keeping with the message of re-using, Lee performed reinvented works from Busoni's transcription of Bach's Chaconne for solo violin, a world premiere of Huang Ruo's reworking of his own chamber concerto and a spellbinding transcription of Ravel's La Valse for orchestra.

You can hear Lee's performance (packed with "a lively imagination and a firm sense of style") at the Listening Room on her website. Re!nvented will be released April 21.