Laura Garritson

Laura Garritson has been a prizewinner in competitions since the age of eight. Recently she has 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. She has also won the Paranov Concerto Competition at The Hartt School 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 Carnegie Recital 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 2002, Ms. Garritson 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. Last year she performed in music festivals in Italy and Spain, and recently she received a Fellowship to attend the prestigious Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Later this year she will perform in a program at the Shandelee Music Festival honoring outstanding alumni.

She holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from The Hartt School at the University of Hartford and is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma at Yale University with Boris Berman. She is a member of the American Liszt Society and the national academic honors societies Alpha Lambda Delta and Alpha Chi. Her other major teachers include internationally renowned pianists Luiz de Moura Castro and Jane Allen.