Fall Festival to Feature Tenor Brian Giebler and Pianist Steve McGhee

By Susan L. Peña

Phoenixville Area High School graduate and Berks Classical Children’s Chorus alum Brian Giebler is living the dream in New York City as an in-demand choral and operatic tenor. His pure, high-register voice has drawn national attention, not only as a soloist for oratorios and symphonies, but for Baroque and contemporary opera and solo recitals with his collaborative pianist, Steve McGhee.

Their 2020 album, “a lad’s love,” received a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, and this success has led to a second album, “a dad’s love,” to be released later this year. His 2025-26 season included 10 symphony performances across the country. Giebler has made “The Roasted Swan” from Carl Orff’s beloved “Carmina Burana” his own, and he is often featured in Handel’s “Messiah,” in J.S. Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” as The Evangelist, and Mozart’s Requiem.

On Sunday, Sept. 20 at 4 p.m., Giebler and McGhee will perform a recital at Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Reading, as part of the Fall Festival of the Arts. Part of the program will give the audience a preview of “a dad’s love,” which features art songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Samuel Barber, Gerald Finzi, and others. They will definitely perform a 13-minute work Giebler commissioned for the album from composer Clarice Assad, entitled “Through the Rainbow’s Edge.”

Giebler and his husband are the delighted parents of a two-year-old boy, and Giebler became interested in how others feel about the complicated journey of parenting. He found 10 LGBTQ+ couples who have children, and gave them 15 prompts to help them explore the topic, and “it resulted in pages and pages of beautiful stories,” he said. “Clarice, Steve and I went through all of it and made a (fictional) story that captures all the experiences. I wanted to show that I have a lot of similar emotional experiences to what my sister went through as a parent. It’s the same for anyone who wants to be a parent. The work reflects me as a person and as an artist, and it’s a response to the need for kindness and understanding right now.”

Looking at the Media section of Giebler’s website (https://www.briangiebler.com/media), with its collage of photographs of the tenor in various roles, presents the portrait of an artist with relentless curiosity and wide-ranging taste. Here, he is wearing little else besides leaves and is surrounded by shopping carts in a Prototype Festival production of the avant-garde “Rev23,” singing the role of Adam. There, he is unrecognizable in a snakey wig and blood-red gown as a demon in a Boston Early Music Festival production of Henry Desmarest’s 1694 work, “Circe.” Another photo shows him as Jack (looking perfectly cast) in a 2018 Charlottesville Opera production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.”

Among his most treasured experiences, he said, were his performances with the Mark Morris Dance Group in Erik Satie’s “Socrate” and Morris’s legendary choreography of Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.”

And of course, he relishes “The Roasted Swan” each time he performs this rock-star solo in “Carmina.” “It’s my favorite thing,” he said. “I take nine breaths for it; that’s all it is. It’s for a very specific voice, and it’s difficult. It requires a lot of warm-up and a lot of precision and being present in the moment.”

What led him down this career path? “My Mom was a music teacher, so I was around music all the time. I started piano early, and then later I dreamed of playing the trumpet,” he said.

Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Giebler and his family moved to Phoenixville when he was about 6, and he wound up playing trumpet in the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra and singing in the Berks Classical Children’s Choir (now renamed the Berks County Youth Chorus). He and a few others commuted to Reading each Monday night to rehearse, and when he became serious about singing, he took voice lessons in Bala Cynwyd. He earned his bachelor’s degree in vocal performance at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and his master’s at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he met his husband.

‍There he also met McGhee, who was his collaborative pianist for his entire two-year master’s program. “We really clicked in terms of collaborating together,” Giebler said. “It was one of those rare symbiotic collaborations where I knew he was calculating everything I wanted to do musically. I’ve never worried that he wasn’t going to be 100-percent with me. We challenge each other musically and have fun working together and looking at repertoire together.”

‍He noted that they were surprised to discover that McGhee had graduated from Owen J. Roberts High School and lived 20 minutes from Giebler. They also both gave senior recitals at Giebler’s family church as teens, but had never run into each other.

‍Giebler said he is taking some family time this summer to have fun with his little boy at home in Queens. He will continue performing in the fall, notably with roles in two operas by Henry Purcell and Georg Telemann the Boston Early Music Festival, and a “St. Matthew Passion” at the historic Trinity Church Wall Street.