Geralyn Giovannetti

Geralyn Giovannetti is Professor of Oboe at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She also teaches woodwind chamber music, graduate oboe pedagogy and literature and performs with the resident faculty ensemble, Orpheus Wind Quintet.

In 2020, Dr. Giovannetti was chosen to receive BYU’s highest teaching honor, the Karl G. Maeser “Excellence in Teaching” award. She has served on numerous faculty, college and university committees and for 9 years was the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the BYU School of Music.

As a member of the Orpheus Wind Quintet, she has appeared at many national and international venues, including engagements throughout the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Spain. The ensemble has also performed recitals and given masterclasses at music festivals in Puebla, Mexico, and in Salvador, Brazil. Dr. Giovannetti has performed with the Utah Symphony and for 15 years was a member of the Ballet West Orchestra. She has also performed with the London (Canada) Symphony Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, and was Co-Principal Oboe of the Canadian Chamber Orchestra in Banff, Canada. She has been an invited guest artist in 15 performances at the annual Conference of the International Double Reed Society.

Prior to joining the faculty at BYU, Dr. Giovannetti was the Principal Oboe of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in Canada. She was also an Instructor at the University of Windsor. While a member of the orchestra, she was a concerto soloist in works by J.S Bach, Mozart, Francaix, Vaughan Williams and Canadian composers, John Weinzweig and Brian Czerny. She also performed with the orchestra’s resident woodwind quintet, Essex Winds. They have received numerous commissions and have released three compact discs. Essex Winds has toured under the auspices of the Jeunesses Musicales du Canada and performed at the Banff Center, the Norfolk Chamber Music Institute, the Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound, Canada, and the Glenn Gould Auditorium in Toronto. The Essex Winds had the honor of performing for Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, and His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, during their Royal Tour of Canada.

The Essex Winds were participants in the 34th International Music Competition in Munich, Germany and were finalists at the 17th annual Jeunesses Musicales Competition in Belgrade, Serbia. The ensemble was invited to be Resident Artists at the world renown Banff Center in Canada. The Essex Winds first CD recording available on the Canadian Music Center’s CENTREDISCS label featured commissioned works by prominent Canadian composers. This CD was nominated for a Juno Award in the Best Canadian Composition category for Malcolm Forsyth’s Quintet for Winds(or…). Fanfare magazine wrote, “EssexWinds play wonderfully…this is one of the best discs of such music to come my way for quite a while. The Forsyth in particular makes this discan important candidate for exploration. If it can manage to circulate it could become a modern classic. Wind players take note the score is published by BMG Ariola. The rest of us normal people can be content with this admirable disc.” 
The ensemble’s second CD release, on FURIANT RECORDS features works from the Classical and Baroque periods by Beethoven, J.C. Bach, Franz Haydn, and Telemann. A 3rd CD, also on FURIANT RECORDS, features important twentieth century works for wind quintet by Henk Badings, Alvin Etler, and Karl Pilss. In a live performance review of Essex Winds, the International Double Reed Society Journal cited,“My first session featured the Essex Winds…For me, this session set thepattern for the whole conference: first, a very high standard of double-reed playing, and most importantly, of musicianship; second, a repertoire that would be dominated by the 20th century.”

Dr. Giovannetti has a deep interest in and love of chamber music. In addition to her work with Orpheus Wind Quintet and Essex Winds, she is the founding member of the Sundance Trio (oboe, bassoon, and piano), Trio Abelia (oboe, horn, and piano), the Madeleine Trio (flute, oboe, and piano), and the CAN-AM Trio (two oboes and English horn). Sundance Trio was formed in 2005 to explore and perform trios written for oboe, bassoon and piano. Based in Utah, members of the trio include oboist Geralyn Giovannetti, bassoonist Christian Smith, and pianist Jed Moss. Together the trio has performed throughout the United States, Canada and Europe at colleges, chamber music series, and at conferences. The trio has a repertoire of over fifty works and actively seeks to encourage new compositions. In 2007 the Barlow Endowment awarded the Sundance Trio a commission. The resulting work, Lyric Essay by Canadian composer, Malcolm Forsyth was premiered at the 2008 International Double Reed Society conference. In 2014 the BYU School of Music commissioned composer, Alyssa Morris to write for the trio. Her composition, Up and Away (Story of a Balloon) was premiered in New York City at NYU as part of the IDRS Conference.

In 2009, the Sundance Trio released their debut CD Recording on the Centaur Records label. The CD includes premiere recordings of works by American composers Margi Griebling-Haigh and David Sargent. A review by the IDRS Journal states, “They aretruly a magnificent ensemble. Each artist is a talented and skillful musician, and since they have performed together so often, their ensemble playing is as good as it gets! This is a marvelous CD-full of interesting, new, and mostly uplifting music for an oboe-bassoon-piano ensemble”. The American Record Guide wrote, “Eachmusician brings understanding of the works and performs with a particular sensitivity suited to the other performers” and the Salt LakeTribune wrote, “The ensemble play is also fabulous.  It’s a remarkable collaborative effort by three like-minded musicians who are equals in musicality and technical astuteness. This is a very fine album, both in the performances and in its conception”.

In 2014, the Sundance Trio released their second CD, Summer Garden, on Centaur Records. This disc includes works by Jenni Brandon, Bill Douglas, Peter Hope, Gernot Wolfgang and Michael Head. Of this album, the American Record Guide wrote, “Theyare exceptionally talented musicians who seem to have broken through the mere performance of music into the world of thoughtful artistry and craft. This is the type of album you’ll want to play over and over.”

Recent tours have taken Sundance Trio to Ireland and Ontario and Quebec, Canada as well as many locations in California, Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho and Utah. Their third CD recording, “Up and Away” was released in 2017 on the Tantara label. Of this new CD, Fanfare Magazine writes, “Theplaying of the Sundance Trio is exemplary to the point that I could notimagine better performances of these works, each of which is a true gemof woodwind chamber music. I cannot conceive of anyone hearing this disc being anything less than thrilled with it”.

The CAN-AM Trio was created in 2019 by oboists Geralyn Giovannetti of Brigham Young University and Sarah Hamilton from The State University of New York at Fredonia, and Anna Mattix, the English hornist with the Buffalo Philharmonic. As colleagues, they share a long musical association and perform together to promote the rich musical tradition of trios written for Two Oboes and English horn. In 2021, CAN-AM Trio was awarded a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to commission, record and tour.

Teaching for over 30 years at BYU, Dr. Giovannetti is a committed educator. Her students are regularly accepted into prestigious graduate schools and now occupy many university faculty positions and perform with arts organizations across the country. Dr. Giovannetti has given masterclasses and played recitals throughout Canada, the US, and abroad, and served as an adjudicator for festivals in Canada and Utah. She has been a Guest Artist and faculty member at the Orfeo Music Festival in Vipiteno, Italy. In service to her profession, Dr. Giovannetti and her colleague, Dr. Christian Smith were the 2008 co-hosts of the International Double Reed Society Conference (IDRS) in Provo, Utah. Dr. Giovannetti has served as a judge for the IDRS Young Artist Competition and for the Asian Double Reed Society Competition. She chaired the Young Artist Oboe Competition for the IDRS from 2014-2020.

Her research interests lie mainly in repertoire for woodwind ensembles. Through her work with Sundance Trio, she has compiled and maintains a database of over 200 original works for oboe, bassoon, and piano.

Dr. Giovannetti received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree from theUniversity of Michigan where she was a Full Fellow and teaching

assistant. She is also a graduate of Western University in her native

Canada.