Nashville Scene: Nashville Symphony's Giancarlo Guerrero Prepares for His Final Season
Talking with the longtime music director ahead of the season kickoff
John Pitcher for Nashville Scene, September 4, 2024
Giancarlo Guerrero has enjoyed considerable success with the Nashville Symphony. Since taking the helm as music director in 2009, he’s conducted 11 world-premiere performances, led the orchestra in 15 critically acclaimed recordings and earned six Grammy Awards. So why’s he calling it quits?
“Post-pandemic, I began thinking that it’s perhaps time for me to move on,” Guerrero tells the Scene. “I’ve accomplished all of my goals here as music director, and I’m excited about the possibility of conducting more concerts in Europe and elsewhere. And besides, by now the orchestra musicians know all of my jokes.”
Many Guerrero fans were surprised when the maestro revealed last summer that he would be leaving the Nashville Symphony at the end of the 2024-25 season. Arguably, they were even more astonished to learn that their favorite conductor would soon take up residence in Florida as the new music director designate of the Sarasota Orchestra. His tenure as full-time music director there officially begins at the start of the 2025-2026 season, according to an announcement released in August.
The fact that Sarasota would be attracted to Guerrero is hardly shocking. The Florida ensemble is currently advancing plans to construct its own purpose-built symphony hall, the first on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Guerrero has already shown that a maestro conducting adventurous music in an acoustically marvelous hall can achieve wonders.
The same thing happened in Nashville. Kenneth Schermerhorn, the Nashville Symphony’s late, great music director and namesake of its concert hall, understood implicitly that to succeed, a regional orchestra needed two things: a great acoustical space (so the musicians can hear one another) and programming that goes beyond the usual classical chestnuts.
For Schermerhorn, who had been a protégé of Leornard Bernstein, adventurous programming mostly revolved around the music of composers active during the first half of the 20th century. The works of Bernstein, Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland were all cornerstones of his repertoire. When the Nashville Symphony began searching for Schermerhorn’s replacement following his death in 2005, Guerrero stood out.
“Our search committee interviewed a number of fine conductors who were very familiar with the great American composers of the past,” says Alan Valentine, the Nashville Symphony’s longtime president and CEO. “Giancarlo, on the other hand, was intimately familiar with all the great American composers of our time. It was very exciting.”
Guerrero conducted the music of one of those contemporary Americans, Jennifer Higdon, during his inaugural 2009-10 season in Nashville. (One suspects it’s no coincidence that Guerrero will conduct more of Higdon’s music during his first concert as Sarasota’s music director this November.)
It’s worth noting that Higdon was the only woman composer to appear on a Nashville Symphony program that year. Times have certainly changed. For the upcoming 2024-25 season, Guerrero has programmed the music of six different female composers along with the works of five BIPOC composers. Guerrero notes that such diversity is long overdue in the ordinarily hidebound world of classical music.
“Orchestras need to change with the times,” says Guerrero. “If our programs begin to look like museum pieces, we won’t survive.” Diverse contemporary composers appearing at the Schermerhorn this season include Missy Mazzoli, Mason Bates, Julia Wolfe, Carlos Simon and Joan Tower, among others.
For all his love of contemporary American music, Guerrero remains above all a devotee of Gustav Mahler. Over the past 15 years, he has led the Nashville Symphony in all 10 of the early-20th-century Austrian composer’s mighty symphonies — each, in Guerrero’s words, “a sonic Mount Everest.” So it’s no surprise that Guerrero will open and close his final season with Mahler’s music.
He starts the season Sept. 13 and 14 with a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, the same piece that closed his first season with the Nashville Symphony in 2010. For his swan song May 23 and 25, he’ll conduct Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 8 “Symphony of a Thousand” with the Nashville Symphony, the Nashville Symphony Chorus and Vanderbilt Youth Choirs.
“I had to save Mahler’s ‘Symphony of Thousand’ for last,” says Guerrero. “I want to go out with a bang.”
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