Margo Garrett, piano

Margo Garrett serves as chair of the accompanying program at the Juilliard School, where she has taught from 1985 to 1991 and again from 2000 to the present. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, Ms. Garrett earned her Bachelor of Music degree from North Carolina School of the Arts and pursued her graduate studies at Manhattan School of Music. Her principal teachers have included Irwin Freundlich, Samuel Sanders, and Pierre Bernac.

As a collaborative pianist, Ms. Garrett has performed with such eminent artists as Jaime Laredo, Daniel Phillips, Paul Neubauer, David Shifrin, Sharon Robinson, Kathleen Battle, Barbara Bonney, Beverly Hoch, Lucy Shelton, Dawn Upshaw, Benita Valente, and Judith Raskin. She has performed the premieres of more than thirty works.

Her recordings appear on the RCA, Nonesuch, MusicMasters, Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammophon, and Dorian labels. Along with soprano Kathleen Battle, she won the 1992 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance, with their recording of Kathleen Battle at Carnegie Hall.

In between her two periods of teaching at Juilliard, Margo Garrett became the first holder of the Ethel Alice Hitchcock Chair in Accompanying and Vocal Coaching at the University of Minnesota’s School of Music, the first privately endowed collaborative chair in the United States. She directed the Tanglewood Music Center vocal fellowship program for the last six of her nineteen years of teaching there, was awarded the 1989 American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) Most Creative Programming Award and, from 1999 through 2006, was Faculty Chair of the Steans Institute for Young Artist’s vocal and chamber music programs at Chicago Symphony’s Ravinia Festival.

Recent seasons have found Ms. Garrett in residence at the Hochschule fí¼r Musik in Munich, a judge at the fifteenth International Schumann Vocal Competition in Zwickau, Germany, and at the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition in New York, in residence at Vancouver International Song Institute, Taiwan Normal Teacher’s University, University of Michigan, and at the Music Academy of the West. She has also served on the faculty of New England Conservatory and as co-director, with Samuel Sanders, of Cape and Islands Chamber Music Festival.