Geoffrey Herd – Geneva Music Festival

Violinist Geoffrey Herd leads a varied and impactful career as a soloist and chamber musician, artistic director, and pedagogue. He has performed throughout the United States, Latin America, and Asia at venues including the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum of Art in Boston and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, and universities and conservatories globally. An avid chamber musician, Dr. Herd has collaborated with prominent musicians including Ettore Causa, Jinjoo Cho, James Dunham, Clive Greensmith, Ani Kavafian, and Jon Kimura Parker. Dr. Herd has performed concertos with numerous orchestras, including the Rochester Philharmonic, the Thailand Philharmonic, the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, the Ithaca College Symphony, the Amherst Symphony, the Finger Lakes Symphony, the University of Tennessee Symphony Orchestra, and the Longmont Symphony. Dr. Herd is the founder and director of the Geneva Music Festival, currently celebrating its 13th annual season. Each summer, the festival gathers many of the nation’s finest performers of classical music and jazz for a month-long series of concerts. The festival is recognized as a leader in innovative programming and is frequently supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and other competitive granting agencies. Recordings from the festival are broadcast regularly on American Public Radio’s Performance Today and other stations around the region and country.

As a pedagogue, Dr. Herd is on faculty at the University of Louisville School of Music where he has built a thriving studio, attracting students from around the globe. His students participate in prestigious festivals including the Aspen, Brevard, Killington, Sarasota, and Wintergreen festivals, have gone on to graduate school at the Yale School of Music, McGill University, and the Cincinnati Conservatory, and are frequent competition winners throughout the country. Mr. Herd has also been on faculty at the University of Tennesee, the Killington and Sewanee Music Festivals, and a guest artist at Encore Chamber Music and the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival. He is the co-director of the Knoxville Suzuki Academy and past president of the Tennessee Chapter of the American String Teachers’ Association. Mr. Herd studied at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, the Yale School of Music, and the Cleveland Institute of Music with Ani Kavafian, Paul Kantor, William Preucil, and David Updegraff. He plays on the “Berkic-Pennington” Carlo Bergonzi made in Cremona in 1737.

Other Artist

Anna Petrova

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Clara Lyon

Clara Lyon is an accomplished performer and curator who forges meaningful connections across sonic languages and societal contexts to foster investigation and imagination.

Clive Greensmith

From 1999 until its final season in 2013, Clive Greensmith was a member of the world-renowned Tokyo String Quartet, giving over one hundred performances each year in the most prestigious international venues, including New York’s Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, London’s South Bank, Paris Chatelet, Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna Musikverein, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo.

Eliot Heaton

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Eric Wong

Celebrated for a “tone like toasted caramel. Amazing.” (Musical Toronto), Eric Wong is the violist of the Cavani String Quartet.

Esther Park

Pianist Esther Park has performed as a soloist with orchestras and in recitals across the United States as well as Asia and major European cities.