Join us on Sunday for a special Mother’s Day Concert and Compline!
Join us on Sunday for a special Mother’s Day Concert and Compline! Dr. Yuri McCoy, organist at South Main Baptist Church will perform on Trinity’s historic pipe organ. The concert starts at 7, and is followed immediately by the short service of compline. #heartofmidtown#midtownhouston @ Trinity Episcopal Church, Houston
Dr. Yuri McCoy, is a recent graduate of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he studied with organist Ken Cowan. He now serves as the Organist at South Main Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. Yuri has a vast repertoire for both piano and organ, and he is especially passionate about music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Whether it is Ligeti’s Etudes on piano or his transcription of Varese’s Amériques for organ, percussion, and assistant, Yuri enjoys the opportunity to share less familiar masterworks with audiences. He also supports the music of living composers, and in 2006 premiered Voices of the Invisible Blue Butterflies by Vach Sharafyan at the SoundSCAPE music festival in Cortona, Italy.
Yuri earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, studying with Dr. Leslie Petteys. While in West Virginia, he won the Concert of Soloists Competition, the West Virginia Music Teachers’ Association Mountain State Collegiate Piano Competition, and the Belle and Lynum Jackson Competition.
In 2010, Yuri earned a Master of Music in piano performance from the University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa. While at the University of Hawai’i, he spent four years as the Organ Scholar of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, working with the Cathedral’s Canon of Music, John Renke. In the summer of 2015, Yuri traveled to Leipzig, Germany, to study organ with Stephan Engels at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy”. In 2016, he performed for the American Guild of Organists National Convention (coincidentally here in Houston), under the direction of Dr. Brady Knapp.
Yuri and his wife, Aska Okamoto—whom he met while studying in Hawai’i—have a daughter, Riley.