Resume

Laura's Resume

Bio

Laura Garritson has been a prizewinner in competitions since the age of eight. In March of this year she was awarded the Silver Medal in the Young Artist Piano Competition in Hartford, Connecticut. She has also won the Emerson String Quartet Competition at The Hartt School and the Artist Presentation Society Competition in St. Louis. In 2000, she was grand prize winner of the Van Rooy Competition for Musical Excellence at The Hartt School, and in 1997 she won the gold prize in the World Piano Competition’s Young Artist Division in Cincinnati. Laura won the Paranov Concerto Competition at The Hartt School in 1996 and has placed first at the Connecticut MTNA Competition several times.

In addition to competing, Ms. Garritson has made solo and concerto appearances in more than ten countries. In the United States, she has performed in venues such as Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York and The Sheldon in St. Louis, and she has appeared as a guest artist on the Shandelee Music Festival Sunset Concert Series in New York, the South Windsor Library Concert Series in Connecticut, the Beethoven Society Music Series in Illinois, and the World Piano Pedagogy Conferences in Philadelphia and St. Louis. Abroad, she has been a featured soloist in the Liszt Festival in Brazil and the International Arts Festival in Venezuela, and she has studied in festivals in Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, France, and Russia. She has performed with orchestras in Poland and Bulgaria and with several in the States, including The Hartford Symphony Orchestra, The Hartt Symphony Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra, and several other St. Louis-area orchestras.

In the summer of 2004, Ms. Garritson received a Fellowship to attend the prestigious Norfolk Chamber Music Festival followed by performances in a program at the Shandelee Music Festival honoring outstanding alumni. In 2002, she was awarded full scholarships to the Sarasota Music Festival in Florida and the Kent/Blossom Chamber Music Festival in Ohio, where she worked with such pianists as Robert Levin and Yefim Bronfman. She has also worked with Emanuel Ax, Leon Fleisher, and Claude Frank, among others. This summer she is attending festivals in Portugal and Spain.

In 2005, Laura and fellow Yale musicians completed a recording project at Yale University in which the complete songs by Charles Ives will be released on the Naxos label.  

She holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from The Hartt School at the University of Hartford where she is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree, and an Artist Diploma from Yale University.  She is a member of the American Liszt Society and the national academic honors societies Alpha Lambda Delta and Alpha Chi. Her major teachers include Luiz de Moura Castro, Boris Berman and the late Jane Allen.