Lent Sermon Series

Monday 24th February

"A Safer Church": Safeguarding

Oscar Lyle Perez started to learn the organ at the age of ten with his first piano teacher, Ben Saul, Director of Music at St Thomas’ Church in Canterbury, and continued his classes on the Father Willis organ in the Chapel at the Faversham Almshouses. He later studied with Keith Moxon, organist at St Catherine’s Church in Faversham, and passed the ABRSM Grade 8 in both organ and piano with Distinction. After meeting Tom Bell, now Director of the Northern Region of the Royal College of Organists, at an RCO “The Organ Scholar Experience” course, he began to have occasional classes with him under the RCO Young Organists programme in 2016.

Since January 2014, Oscar has combined his studies at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham with church music every weekend, as he has played for Sunday services, weddings, baptisms, and Christmas services in various different churches in Faversham, Davington, Ospringe, Herne Bay, and Canterbury. In September 2016 he was appointed Organ Scholar at St Mary-the-Virgin in Dover, as well as continuing to act as assistant organist at St Catherine’s and the Faversham Almshouses Chapel.  Oscar has attended the Oundle for Organists course, and also several organ and conducting courses organised by the Royal College of Organists in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. In August 2017, he attended the Eton Choral Course in Cambridge as organist.

He has been extending his repertoire by giving recitals since 2014, at the Almshouses Chapel and St Catherine’s in Faversham, at St Mary’s in Dover and this year, for the first time, at Holy Trinity Church in Folkestone. He has taken an active part in the musical scene in Faversham, whether playing the piano for recitals in the Assembly Rooms, singing as a member of the Faversham Voices, or accompanying the Faversham Choral Society on the organ at their Christmas Concert in 2016 at St Mary´s.

From September 2018 Oscar will be reading Economics at UCL, including a year abroad studying in Nancy, France. He is keen on languages, and apart from speaking both English and Spanish, he is building up his French and German. He enjoys reading and windsurfing and, yes, watching TV series on the internet.

Oscar is looking forward to developing as an organist while he is part of the Grosvenor Chapel community, and is preparing for the Associate of the Royal College of Organists diploma.