Nashville4All Profile: Giancarlo Guerrero: Nicaragua and Costa Rica

In his second year in the Costa Rica Youth Orchestra, Giancarlo Guerrero had to pick an instrument. His first choice was the violin, but the line for the aptitude test was 50 people deep. Next door, just a couple of kids were waiting with their moms to try out for percussion. Giancarlo wasn’t entirely sure what percussion was, but he switched lines anyway. When he entered, “The guy gave me a couple of sticks,” Giancarlo says, “and said ‘Go like this — click, click,’ and I went, ‘click, click.’ He said, ‘You’re in.’”

His parents had enrolled him in the orchestra thinking it would keep him busy. It ended up being the center of his life and the start of an international career as a conductor.

Beginning when he was 11 years old, Giancarlo and his friends in the youth orchestra practiced every day, and eventually performed throughout Latin America. One of his friends had a shortwave radio that picked up broadcasts from Chicago’s classical radio station WFMT, so they could listen to the symphonies of Chicago, Boston and New York. “To this day,” says Giancarlo, “those are my closest friends in the world.” Their heroes were people like horn player Dale Clevenger and trumpeter Bud Herseth from the Chicago Symphony.

Giancarlo went on to study music at Baylor University and earn his master’s in percussion and conducting at Northwestern. He worked with the acclaimed Sistema Youth Orchestra in Venezuela, took jobs in Minnesota and Oregon, and was chosen as conductor of the Nashville Symphony in 2009, three years after the new Schermerhorn Symphony Center opened.

By any measure, he has been a smashing success. He has won six Grammys, all with the Nashville Symphony, and conducted world premieres of the works of numerous American composers. He has been guest conductor for orchestras all over the world. But his greatest legacy may be the Accelerando program, which aims to do for Nashville youth what the Costa Rica Youth Orchestra did for him: Mentor promising young people and give them the opportunity to perform and train for elite music programs. Accelerando graduates have gone on to study at some of the best music schools in the United States: Juilliard, the University of Indiana, Colburn and Curtis.

From Nicaragua to Costa Rica

It was his parents’ decision to leave his home country of Nicaragua that put Giancarlo on a path to music. His family was among thousands of middle-class citizens who left after the Sandinista rebels overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. The Sandinistas nationalized the banking system, confiscated Somoza’s vast property, and began restricting certain freedoms. The priests at Giancarlo’s Catholic school disappeared and were replaced by teachers from Cuba. The company his father worked for dissolved. Leaving with just the clothes on their backs, Giancarlo’s parents took their three children to his maternal grandmother’s house near the border with Costa Rica. There, they were able to obtain passes to cross the border, and started over in the city of San José. His dad eventually found another job as an agricultural engineer, and his mother, who had been a full-time homemaker, baked cakes to sell to local restaurants. “My father said it was like getting married again,” says Giancarlo, “only with three kids and no presents.”

His parents thought they could enroll Giancarlo and his older brother in a Catholic school affiliated with the one they attended in Nicaragua, but officials there said they had reached their limit on refugees. A friend told them about a private school owned by a Cuban immigrant, herself a refugee. “They opened their heart,” says Giancarlo, “understanding my parents might not have the means to pay.”

At first, their apartment was mostly empty — Giancarlo remembers playing squash in the living room with his brother — because his parents were not ready to settle in permanently. They held out hope that conditions would improve in Nicaragua. In the meantime, seeing that Giancarlo liked to sing and seemed interested in music, they signed him up for the Costa Rica Youth Orchestra. No such organization existed in Nicaragua, and in fact, classical music training was scant throughout Latin America. Giancarlo had never had music lessons or listened to classical music.

The publicly financed Costa Rica Youth Orchestra has trained many young people who went on to have careers in music. It was founded in 1971 during the presidency of Jose Figueres Ferrer, who is credited with establishing democracy in Costa Rica. The music education program has been replicated throughout Latin America, most famously in Venezuela’s El Sistema program.

“Almost 50 years later, you’re seeing the product of that,” says Giancarlo, “not only with conductors but with musicians in the United States, Israel, Berlin, France — it’s become our greatest export.”

Giancarlo’s youth revolved around practice and performance. He still listened to Led Zeppelin and watched MTV, like most kids, but the orchestra was his touchstone. “We were all so passionate about it, and to find teenage kids that are passionate about anything, this was remarkable, it was the best imaginable peer pressure,” says Giancarlo. “Yes, we still got in trouble, we were kids, but in the end we focused. When it came time to do our homework, we did it, and we practiced — a lot of it was, we wanted to keep our group together.”

From Costa Rica to Texas

While Giancarlo was playing in the youth orchestra, several of his older musician friends had graduated from secondary school and enrolled at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. They did well. Music faculty wanted to know if there were more like them in the Costa Rica Youth Orchestra, and eventually offered a one-year full-tuition scholarship to Giancarlo. He was just 17, and his English was sketchy. “My parents, God bless them, they basically gathered up enough money to get me a plane ticket and gave me a couple of hundred bucks and said go. My father, to his credit, said to me, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? If it doesn’t work out, you can come back, but at least you’ll know, you won’t have this ‘what if’?”

He has described going from Costa Rica to Texas as “like going from Earth to Pluto,” but he acclimated quickly. He was enlisted to play in the school’s Golden Wave marching band. “Here’s a guy who had never been to an American football game, he knew nothing about marching band, didn’t know much about English, and he was given a set of snare drums by Dr. [Larry] Vanlandingham, and was told go out there and figure this out and make a bunch of friends,” remembers Michael Haithcock, who was then Baylor band director and is now at the University of Michigan. “He was out there, and I said OK, go to the 20-yard line, and he stood there because he saw two 20-yard lines, one on each side of the 50. He stood there, frozen, then one of the other percussionists said, ‘Stay beside me.’”

Haithcock said Giancarlo’s “uncommon intelligence” and ability to rapidly absorb and process music was clear from the beginning. He lived in a house for international students run by a local church, cheaper than the campus dorms, and he made friends easily. “Giancarlo is an effervescent personality who collects people around him,” says Haithcock.

During Giancarlo’s years at Baylor, the music school brought in top composers, such as John Harbison and Jacob Druckman, both Pulitzer Prize winners, as well as John Rockwell, who was music critic for the New York Times. “I would give him lists of new composers and new music to learn,” says Haithcock. “I think his ear, his quick absorption ability, got tweaked and interested.”

That exposure to new music had a lasting effect. All six of Giancarlo’s Grammys have been for recordings of contemporary music.

“Listen, I love my Beethoven, my Rachmaninoff and Brahms, and I do enough of that, but if that’s all I were to do, I would be very bored,” says Giancarlo. “Remember, Beethoven was new at some point. Remember, Mozart had world premieres. Back in the day their music was also somewhat rejected because again, we tend to like the old; the new sometimes is scary. It’s our responsibility as artists, myself as a conductor — I also have to expose my audience not only to what they know but also to what is happening right now, what is relevant, and what in the next 40 years or 10 years or 15 years will become the next Mozart.”

First a drummer, then a conductor

As a young man, conducting was not an obvious choice for Giancarlo. During his years at Baylor, he put off his obligatory conducting class until his junior year. He remembers Haithcock telling him at the end of the semester, “You know what, you could be good at this. You have natural talent. You’re used to having a stick in your hand. You have good rhythm.” He gave Giancarlo private conducting lessons (at no charge) and lists of things he should know, then helped with his graduate school application.

Giancarlo still has video footage of himself conducting in Haithcock’s class. “I don’t see it,” he says of the potential his professor saw. But he decided to pursue both percussion and conducting in his graduate studies. “I wasn’t ready to give up my drums yet.”

“I would go to the music library and I would see Giancarlo up there with scores strewn all around and recordings,” says Haithcock. “He was just voracious in his appetite and his quick assimilation of what he heard. I’m not sure if he has a photographic memory, but it seems as if he comes very close.” Also, “He didn’t have the American point of view of social life. He was willing to spend that extra time, and frankly, didn’t have any money.”

Outside of his music classes, his favorite teacher was James Vardaman, a well-liked historian whose course on western civilization captivated Giancarlo. Vardaman would walk in the class carrying a cup of coffee. “He would go, where were we last week? Oh, 1725 France…and he would start going off — names, places dates — but everything that he said, he had commentary about every character. He made these characters alive. What I remember the most, which I use to this day, is the love and the passion he had for the subject. Not only did he know it, but you could see that he adored this subject. And that made an impact on me…When people tell me, you speak so fabulously, I say, ‘Well, you’re paying homage to Dr. Vardaman, because that’s where I got it from.” Giancarlo models his pre-concert lectures after Vardaman.

Giancarlo’s first 13 years as conductor of the Nashville Symphony have brought challenges of biblical proportions. There was Nashville’s flood of 2010, when the Cumberland River crested 12 feet above flood stage and water pressure cracked the concrete slabs of the basement floor of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Five million gallons of water flowed into the sub-basement and basement, incurring $42 million in costs. The hall’s electrical control center, two Steinway pianos (valued at $100,000 each) and the console of the center’s $2.5 million organ were destroyed, along with other damage. The Symphony Center was closed for six months while repairs were made.

The COVID pandemic dealt another blow. All public performances ceased in 2020, and the entire symphony was furloughed for six months. Some talented players moved on, needing to support their families or wanting to explore other opportunities. But Giancarlo continued to travel on a special visa, working with orchestras in Europe that practiced social distancing and performed for smaller audiences. On one occasion, he landed in the Frankfurt Airport, one of the busiest in the world, in a plane with only five passengers. “This was like the zombie apocalypse,” says Giancarlo. “It was so scary, but at the same time, yes, everything shut down, but there were all these other parts of the world that were trying to move forward.” Restrictions on concerts changed by the hour; one might be scheduled for an audience filling just half of a hall, then reduced to 10 percent, then changed to streaming on the internet.

During the pandemic, Giancarlo continued his positions as music director of the Wrocław Philharmonic in Poland and principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal. The connection with Wrocław started five years ago when he filled in for a conductor who was sick. The program was Lutosławski’s Funeral Music for Strings, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony. “It was, like they say, love at first sight,” says Giancarlo. “I immediately connected with the orchestra…I told my jokes, they laughed at me, they felt comfortable with me. My musical ideas had a reception. I would say something, and I wouldn’t get any of that ‘we’ve never done it like that.’”

That same openness to new ideas is what draws contemporary composers to premiere music with the Nashville Symphony. “They understand when they come here, the audience is going to give them a fair listening,” says Giancarlo, “that they’re going to embrace it.”

“The things he’s done, very smartly for Nashville, is embrace this concept of Nashville being Music City, open to all kinds of music,” says Haithcock. “We talk about this when we get together: Are you going to outmuscle Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia with just Beethoven and Brahms? What he’s done with all these Grammys, people know of the Nashville symphony in a way that they did not prior to his tenure. That doesn’t lessen the work that [Leonard] Slatkin did there or, for many years, [Kenneth] Schermerhorn. But it’s just a different day, and he’s sort of been ahead of the diversity game with the programming that he’s done and commissioned.”

Other orchestras, such as those in San Francisco and Los Angeles, also have a reputation for being open to new music. “What’s unique about what Giancarlo has achieved,” says Haithcock, “is the systematic archiving with all the recordings…I think what he’s done is so smart, because he’s put Nashville on the map in a way, while embracing all that Nashville is.”

The voice of the composer

In 2018, the Nashville Symphony premiered composer Jonathan Leshnoff’s Symphony No. 4, Heichalos, inspired by an ancient Jewish mystical text. The string section played with 22 violins owned by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust. In a podcast, Leshnoff explained how he wanted the orchestra to be in a meditative space as they performed the piece: “That’s why the beginning of the second part of the symphony actually starts with a question — it’s a full measure rest, with a fermata. No one plays, but everyone prepares. The measure says who do you love? Who? Was it family, a friend, a teacher? The idea of that is so that the musicians don’t go right into the music, that they take a deep breath and get themselves set.”

As Leshnoff was telling the orchestra this, Giancarlo relates in the podcast, “You could hear a pin drop in the hall, you could see the players really trying to make that connection and understand this is not just a bunch of notes on the page. There is a deeper meaning to everything that we’re doing, and at the end there was nothing left to be said other than ‘let’s play the music.’”

“It’s both exhilarating but also quite scary at times to have the composer there, because you want to make sure in the end it is his or her voice…We have to try things out faster, slower, louder, softer, brighter, darker – it’s like watching the birth of a new being.”

Giancarlo recently returned to conduct the Chicago Symphony, including a performance of Astor Piazzolla’s Aconcagua Concerto. Piazzolla was an Argentine tango composer who incorporated elements of jazz and classical music into his pieces, and was himself a virtuoso bandoneonist. (Bandoneons are a type of concertina, like an accordion, but with buttons on both ends.) In an preview of the performance on YouTube, Giancarlo described the Aconcagua concerto as an unusual orchestration of strings, piano, harp, percussion and bandoneon. The first movement features the driving rhythmic pattern of the tango, the second opens with a melancholy bandoneon melody, and the third, Giancarlo says, quoting Piazzollo, “I didn’t know how to finish it, and then I told myself I give them a tango so the audience knows that I can write academic music when I want, but when I want I can also do my own thing.”

This past season Ginacarlo made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony and conducted the world premiere of John Corigliano’s Triathlon, a concerto for saxophonist and orchestra. The guest saxophonist was Timothy McAllister, a Grammy Award-winning musician who attended band camp at Baylor one summer, with Giancarlo as his counselor.

“I have former students who play in a lot of these big orchestras, like Boston, Philadelphia,” says Haithcock. “Every time Giancarlo guest conducts there, they contact me and say, ‘We just love working with Giancarlo. He’s such an easy guy to follow.”

Nashville has undergone tremendous change since Giancarlo arrived, in its skyline, neighborhoods, ethnic diversity and national profile. That has brought with it growing pains. But Giancarlo is exhilarated by the growth. “I love what I see, how Nashville is changing, how it’s growing, and that means people from all different walks of life with different mentalities. Yes, at first it can be a little chaotic and we’re seeing that in our traffic, but I do think the end result is going to be all positive just because of the diversity of thought, of ideas, of experiences that we all share together.”

Giancarlo’s two daughters were in first and third grade when he moved to Nashville; the older one has graduated with a degree in economics from Northwestern, the younger one is a biology major at New York University. He met his wife when she was teaching his brother’s children in a Montessori kindergarten in Costa Rica.

His former band director, Haithcock, praises Giancarlo’s groundedness and ability to stay connected with old friends and mentors. “He doesn’t put on airs. A lot of conductors will have the orchestra seated and tuned, then they make an entrance to start the rehearsal. Every rehearsal I’ve been to, Giancarlo is out there when players are coming in, he’s talking to them, he’s asking questions. It’s very collaborative. The way he’s been so generous to me is an example of his humanity. I don’t think he’s ever forgotten from whence he came.”

Posted 3 days ago by Sheri Sellmeyer

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