About

About Marco A. Jimenez

Marco Jimenez is a composer, organist, pianist and violinist. He will be attending Columbia and Juilliard as a cross-enrollment student. He has won numerous awards and performed as a soloist, concertmaster, and chamber musician. His composition prizes include First Place in the Florida Federation of Music Clubs Junior Composer’s Contest, the John and Margaret Pierson Award for the National Federation of Music Clubs, and Honorable Mention for the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award. TrevCo Music Publishing has published three of his compositions: Suite No. 1 in E minor for unaccompanied bassoon (2017), A Russian Fantasy (for woodwind quintet) (2017), and A Child’s Memories for oboe and piano (2020).

Marco made his debut as a pianist at age 15 with the Sarasota Orchestra as the winner of the Edward and Ida Wilkof Young Artists competition, where he performed the 1st movement of Mozart’s Concerto No. 24. He was a repeat winner two years later, where he performed the 1st movement of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1. As the winner of the Justine LeBaron Young Artists Competition in 2019, Marco will be playing the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major with the Florida Orchestra in 2021. He was also the winner of the National Federation of Music Clubs Stillman-Kelley Award for Piano in 2019. Marco was invited to perform for the Lang Lang International Music Foundation’s Play It Forward® Virtual Series, which took place on October 23, 2020, and has also been invited to give numerous public performances, including the Florida Federation Music Club and the Steinway Society of Sarasota.

In addition to composing and playing the piano, Marco also plays the violin and organ. As a violinist, he has been playing in the Sarasota Orchestra Youth Program for the last ten years, including as concertmaster last season of the Youth Philharmonic, which is their most advanced group. Marco was also a 2020 Honorable Mention winner of the National YoungArts Competition in three disciplines for classical music: piano, organ, and composition, and in 2021, Marco won Merit Honors in piano for that same competition.

Over the past five summers, Marco has attended the Interlochen Center for the Arts, Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute (BUTI) for violin and piano, the Southeastern Piano Festival (SEPF), Philadelphia Young Pianists’ Academy (PYPA), the Texas Organ Academy Online Summer Camp, and the American Composers Orchestra (ACO) Intensive Virtual Program.

Marco is passionate about learning and has a wide range of interests, from physics to philosophy to Persian culture to folk music. He has excelled in his high school studies and has just been named a Finalist in the 2021 National Merit Scholarship Program. Marco is trilingual and speaks fluent English, Spanish, and Chinese. He also plays competitive chess and earned his black belt in karate in 2014. During the summer of 2020, Marco co-founded and hosted the podcast “Full Cadence.”