Olga Zilboorg
Olga Zilboorg (June 30, 1933 – April 22, 2017) was an American cellist and music teacher. Born in Mexico City, she became a long-time cello educator on Long Island and helped start the North Shore Pro Musica chamber group.
She grew up as one of three daughters of James M. Zilboorg and Eugenia Helfman Zilboorg. Her family were Jewish immigrants from Kyiv; her father was an industrial engineer and her uncle was psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg. Olga began cello studies in Mexico with Imre Hartmann and later studied at the University of Kansas with Raymond Stuhl and at the Manhattan School of Music with Bernard Greenhouse. She also studied in Italy with André Navarra and composer Luigi Dallapiccola.
Her career included joining the St. Louis Symphony in 1957 as one of its first women members and touring with the St. Louis Trio. She competed in the Pablo Casals International Cello Contest in 1959 and the Tchaikovsky Contest in 1962. Her debut recitals in 1962–1963 took place at Wigmore Hall, the Musikverein, and Carnegie Recital Hall. She supported Dallapiccola’s Ciaccona for solo cello and appeared in the pit orchestra for Hello, Dolly! in 1964.
After 1965, Olga focused on teaching cello on Long Island and later joined the faculty of the Stony Brook University Pre-College Music Program. She was a founding member of North Shore Pro Musica in 1981 and performed with the Long Island Philharmonic. In 2009, the New York State Senate honored her for her arts contributions.
Olga married Thomas F. Irvine Jr. in 1965. They had a daughter, Tatiana, and a son, Thomas A. Irvine, who teaches music at the University of Southampton in the U.K. Olga Zilboorg died in 2017 in Port Jefferson, New York, at age 83. Some of her family papers are at Yale University.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:03 (CET).