Oliver Wolcott

Oliver Wolcott is a senior at St. Anne’s-Belfield Upper School. A piano student of Jeanne Wonderly Jackson, he has consistently scored highest ratings in the annual Charlottesville Music Teachers’ Association’s Festival. For the past seven years he has been on the Piano Guild’s National Roll and in May, 2007, he received the Advanced Bach Award for his performance of fifteen advanced pieces by J.S. Bach which placed him on the Guild’s International Roll for the second time. He is the 2008 winner of the Allison Phillips Hamilton Grade Ten Piano Division Competition sponsored by the Wednesday Music Club and the 2008/2009 winner of the Concerto Competition sponsored by the CMTA and the Youth Orchestra of Charlottesville/Albemarle.
An organ student of Peggy Kelley Reinburg, a member of the faculty of The Center for Sacred Music Studies of Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Virginia, and of Barbara Moore in Charlottesville, he has performed throughout the eastern United States including at National City Christian Church in Washington, DC where this spring he will perform as part of the Bach Birthday Celebration Marathon, at the chapel of St. John’s College, Cambridge University and at The Jack Singer Concert Hall, EPCOR Center for the Performing Arts, Calgary, Alberta. Oliver was twice a guest on WTJU’s show devoted to the pipe organ, “The King of Instruments” hosted by Michael Latsko. He has also studied with Donald Sutherland, Ken Cowan, Alan Morrison, David Higgs, James David Christie and Simon Preston. In May, 2007, he won first place in the American Guild of Organists Quimby Regional Competition for Young Organists for the Northern Virginia Chapter and represented the Chapter at the Region III convention in Baltimore that summer. Oliver is the first two-time winner of the Delaware Chapter’s Vernon de Tar Scholarship and in May of 2008 took first place in the Jeryl Powell Scholarship Competition for the Roanoke Chapter of the AGO.
Oliver served for two years as Apprentice Organist at First Presbyterian Church under Jeffery LeDuc playing services regularly including accompanying the sanctuary choir. He accompanied the choir with full orchestra for Mozart’s Solemn Vespers of the Confessor in March 2007.
Oliver currently studies orchestral and choral conducting with Dr. Donald G. Loach, Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of Virginia and Director of Music at St. Paul’s Memorial Episcopal Church, singing in his choir and conducting the choir as part of his study.