Dr. Margaret Marco is Professor of Oboe at the University of Kansas School of Music and principal oboist of the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra. She performs frequently with the Kansas City Symphony and is a founding member of the NAVO Trio, an oboe, violin, and piano trio dedicated to the performance, discovery, and commissioning of music by women composers. Margaret began her professional career as the principal oboist of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Maracaibo in Venezuela. Since then, her many solo, chamber and orchestral performances have taken her to a variety of prestigious international venues in locations including the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory of Music in Milan and the distinguished Central Conservatory and China Conservatory in Beijing where she performed and presented master classes. She served as Chair of the IDRS Fernand Gillet-Hugo Fox Oboe Competition from 2009-2017 and holds degrees from Northwestern University, The University of Iowa and the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
A strong advocate for new music for her instrument, Dr. Marco has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Wunsch New Music Fund, and the University of Kansas to perform and record new chamber works by American composers. She can be heard with the KU Wind Ensemble performing Copland’s Quiet City on the NAXOS label and on NAVONA Records performing Gorgeous Nothings by Ingrid Stölzel and Bells and Grass by Juliana Hall. Other recordings include her solo CDs, Hidden Gems: Oboe Sonatas of the French Baroque, Vols. I&II, Still Life: New Music for Oboe, Oboe d’amore, and English horn, Allégresse; music for flute, oboe and piano andFresh Ink, which received positive reviews in American Record Guide, Chamber Music Today and the International Double Reed Society Journal. She is heard frequently performing on Kansas Public Radio. In 2016, she commissioned A Siege of Herons, a concerto for oboe d’amore and strings by KU composition professor Forrest Pierce, which she premiered with the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra. She recently traveled to Mexico, where she performed concerts and taught classes at several prominent institutions, including the Escuela Superior de Música y Danza de Monterrey, Universidad Veracruzana’s Facultad de Música, Instituto Superior de Música del Estado de Veracruz, Conservatorio de Música de Celaya, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Latin America’s largest university. Last summer, she performed as a guest soloist with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional in Guatemala City. She is a Marigaux Artist and performs on a Marigaux M2.
