Grant Park Music Festival selects new chief baton: Giancarlo Guerrero
By Hannah Edgar, Chicago Tribune
October 1, 2024
The Grant Park Music Festival has announced that outgoing Nashville Symphony music director Giancarlo Guerrero will succeed Carlos Kalmar as its its next artistic director and principal conductor.
After leading two powerful concerts was at the festival in July, Guerrero was formally sworn in by a unanimous board vote on Sept. 23. The vote concluded a three-year search for Kalmar’s successor, spearheaded by a committee of musicians and board members. Kalmar, the festival’s principal conductor since 2000 and artistic director since 2011, remains associated with the organization as its conductor laureate.
“I’ve been (at Grant Park) a few times in the past, but this last visit was special. The connection was immediate and very, very palpable,” Guerrero told the Tribune on a call from Tenerife in Spain, where he was conducting the island’s symphony orchestra.
The announcement comes during a transition period for Guerrero, 55. Next season he takes the helm of the Sarasota Orchestra, whose stature he hopes to raise in much the same way he rocket-powered the Nashville Symphony. He also remains an in-demand guest conductor at major orchestras across the country, including the Chicago Symphony..
During his fruitful 16-year tenure in Nashville, Guerrero commissioned some two dozen works by living American composers and released a slew of successful recordings on the Naxos American Classics imprint, which, to date, have won 11 Grammy Awards.
That résumé line plays especially well with the Grant Park Music Festival, a free classical music series that plays annually during the summer at Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. The festival, which just wrapped its 80th season, is likely the most venturesome of its kind in the United States. One could hear the Grant Park Festival Orchestra and Chorus perform more American music and contemporary music in a month at Jay Pritzker Pavilion than the CSO does in a year at Orchestra Hall.
“Everyone agreed this is the perfect person to continue to build on what Carlos already established,” says festival president and CEO Paul Winberg.
Guerrero made his Grant Park debut in 2008, as part of a concert associated with the former Latino Music Festival. Prior to his most recent stand, Guerrero last conducted the orchestra in a 2014 program which included Richard Danielpour’s “Darkness in the Ancient Valley,” a Nashville Symphony co-commission.
When Guerrero returned to the festival this summer, his decade-long absence seemed to collapse into a blip. Guerrero started with a diptych of Joan Tower and Shostakovich 5, dense and devastating as a cannonball.
“He had a very different idea about the piece that I hadn’t experienced before,” says Jennifer Lawson, Grant Park’s piccolo and assistant principal flute, of the Shostakovich symphony. “I’ve played that many times — it’s one of my favorites as a piccolo player — but it was much more emotional and on edge than I had ever played it before.”
Later, musicians say he passed his world-premiere, soloist and choral trials —with Jim Stephenson’s “You have reached the city limits,” Beethoven’s “Emperor” with Terrence Wilson, and Duruflé’s Requiem, respectively — with colors. Lawson and tenor Tyler Lee, representing the Festival Chorus on the search committee, singled out the Requiem as a special highlight, which Guerrero conducted without a score.
“He was very specific in what he wanted — with his beat patterns, with his cutoffs, with his cues. Everything was very intentional. You won’t always get that specificity with guest conductors,” Lee says. “He was able to get a sense of cogency and enthusiasm from both the chorus and the orchestra that I hadn’t seen since Carlos Kalmar.”
When describing Guerrero, all four of the committee members who spoke to the Tribune for this story independently fished up the same adjective: energetic. They’re not wrong. Talking to Guerrero is a little like sipping from a firehose — of ideas, of musical connections, of beloved recent repertoire.
Conductors need energy to land this gig. Grant Park concert cycles are punishing: The elements and downtown racket can be wearing, rehearsal time is minimal, and, thanks to Kalmar’s influence, the repertoire is often esoteric — always more of a lift to prepare than standard rep.
For a time, fellow Grant Park hopefuls Ludovic Morlot and Eric Jacobsen seemed to have an edge in the podium race. Both conducted the orchestra two seasons in a row, progressing from semifinalists to finalists in 2024. Both also had three concerts last summer to woo the Grant Parkers, to Guerrero’s two.
But even a summer storm for didn’t dampen the musicians’ enthusiasm for Guerrero’s visit 10 years ago. While soliciting names of possible artistic directors from musicians, the committee heard Guerrero’s name enough for him to be considered a finalist, 10 years later.
“From the musicians’ standpoint, this was somebody who could quickly galvanize the group,” Winberg says.
Guerrero was born in Nicaragua but spent his formative years in Costa Rica, where his family fled after the outbreak of the Contra War. There, he joined his first youth symphony and was exposed to a professional orchestra for the first time: the CSO, via syndicated 98.7 WFMT radio broadcasts.
Little did he know he would someday hear his musical idols up close. After graduating with a degree in percussion performance from Baylor University, Guerrero continued his studies at Northwestern University. Even when money was tight, he took the train downtown weekly to drink in the city’s musical offerings. That included the CSO and, yes, the Grant Park Music Festival. Back then, in the early 1990s, the orchestra played at the Petrillo Bandshell and Millennium Park was hardly a glimmer in Richard M. Daley’s eye.
“It shaped my professional thinking about everything that was possible,” Guerrero says. “Because it has the festival feel, the musicians have this great camaraderie. That’s one of the things that attracted me when I was there.”
Prior to the Nashville post, Guerrero was music director of the Eugene Symphony, a guest conductor for the Cleveland Orchestra’s Miami residency and the associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra. Internationally, Guerrero was formerly music director of the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Symphony in Lisbon.
Chicago has only gotten closer to Guerrero’s heart in the intervening years. Guerrero has become a familiar face at the CSO, and one of his daughters —herself a Northwestern alum — lives in Evanston.
“Chicago has always been a place that the family comes and hangs together,” he says.
Like Klaus Mäkelä at the Chicago Symphony, the years-long sudoku puzzle that that is season scheduling means Guerrero will ease into his Grant Park term. He’ll appear for a few concerts next summer, but since the 2025 season was already partly booked and planned before his appointment, it will be something of a soft-launch for 2026, when he’ll fully settle into the role.
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