Chicago Classical Review: Guerrero adds adventurous touch to his first Grant Park season

By Lawrence A. Johnson

The 2025 installment of the Grant Park Music Festival will bring  a characteristically bracing mix of American and contemporary music mixed with repertory standards this summer.

The key difference is that for the first time in a quarter-century there will be a new principal conductor on the podium leading the Grant Park Orchestra.

Giancarlo Guerrero was tapped as Carlos Kalmar’s successor last fall. And while prior commitments prevent him from opening the festival season, the Costa Rica-born conductor will still be leading five of the festival’s ten weeks in 2025.

“I’m looking forward to coming to Chicago and I can’t tell you how proud I am to be doing concerts with this wonderful orchestra and chorus,” said Guerrero from his home in Miami.

Guerrero, a six-time Grammy winner, is currently in his 16th and final season leading the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. He will begin his new post as music director of the Sarasota Orchestra in the fall of 2025.

After leading his first Grant Park concert in July, Guererro was appointed Kalmar’s successor (with a three-year contract) in September. He noted that some of the 2025 programming was already in the books. “But we were lucky that I was still able to be there for five weeks. In many ways the scheduling gods were smiling upon us.”

Grant Park audience regulars will be heartened to learn that Kalmar’s commitment to both contemporary works and neglected American music of the past will continue this summer with Alan Hovhaness’s Mysterious Mountain and Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 “Romantic” among the works on the summer schedule.

“I’m a champion of American music—contemporary music overall, but especially American music,” said Guerrero.

“These are two works that almost suffered for being too popular for many years, through the ’70s. And then for some reason—maybe because people started writing thornier and more challenging music—they kind of fell out of favor.”

“I think they’re some of the greatest symphonies ever written and I’m delighted that I was able to add both of them my first season at Grant Park.”

Among the other local rarities will be Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and orchestra that the composer had written for his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Though the melodic 2005 cycle quickly became entrenched in the concert hall, this summer’s performances will mark its Grant Park debut.

Guerrero is also looking forward to revisiting Augusta Read Thomas’s Brio. “It’s a piece that I did once many years ago and I just fell in love with it. And this is a very, very difficult piece, one that is only available to very virtuosic orchestras. So I thought this was a wonderful opportunity for bringing it back.”

Guerrero is even managing to put a bit of topspin on such a familiar warhorse as Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 . At his June concerts, Guerrero will perform Mahler’s First with the Blumine movement, which Mahler later excised from the score. 

“A few conductors have done it—Zubin Mehta and Ozawa,” said Guerrero. “I have done Blumine as kind of an ‘overture’ before the symphony, but this will be my first time actually doing it as the second movement of the symphony. It really presents the First Symphony in a different light and I think people will hear it with fresh ears.” 

Giancarlo Guerrero will make his first Grant Park appearance of the summer June 18. Photo: Norman Timonera/GPMF

Guerrero’s first concert takes place the second week of the festival due to prior commitments. On June 18 he will lead a program featuring Hailstork’s An American Port of Call, Bernstein’s Symphonic SuIte from On the Waterfront and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with concertmaster Jeremy Black as soloist.

Guerrero’s first weekend (June 20-21) will bring the aforementioned Mahler Symphony No. 1 and the local premieres of Clarice Assad’s Baião N’ Blues and Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño with trumpet soloist Pacho Flores.

Others works to be led by Guerrero this summer include Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony, Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. He will also conduct the Chicago premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Icarus as well as Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, the latter with mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges as soloist (August 1-2). The season will close August 15-16 with Orff’s Carmina Burana, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Easter Festival Overture and Hovhaness’s Symphony No. 2 “Mysterious Mountain.” 

The 2025 Grant Park season will open June 11 with Andrew Litton leading a program of de Falla’s Suite from The Three-Cornered Hat and Gabriela Lena Frank’s Three Latin American Dances. Litton will also be piano soloist in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Osmo Vänskä, a Guerrero friend and mentor, will make his festival debut July 2-3 leading Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Henry Dorn’s Transitions and Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy with Paul Huang as soloist.

In addition to directing the Independence Day concert on July 4,  Grant Park chorus director Christopher Bell will conduct the GPO and Chorus June 13-14 in Holst’s The Planets, with Jake Runestad’s Earth Symphony and Lily Boulanger’s Psalm 24 making up the choral first half.

Other guest conductors this season include Nicole Paiement on July 9 (Debussy, Smetana and Mark Adamo); Anthony Parnther July 11-12 (Brahms, Bruckner and Margaret Bonds); Courtney Lewis July 16 (Elgar, Johann Strauss and Anna Clyne); Keri-Lynn Wilson July 18-19 (Prokofiev, Lysenko and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Augustin Hadelich) and Joseph Young (Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with pianist Steven Osborne).

Other soloists include the Imani Winds, cellist Inbal Segev, pianists Joyce Yang and Clayton Stephenson, violinist Jennifer Koh, sopranos Janai Brugger and Jana McIntyre, countertenor John Holiday, and baritones Troy Cook and Sankara Harouna.

One name absent from the podium roll is that of Carlos Kalmar. Fear not. This was a long-planned summer off after the conclusion of Kalmar’s 25-year tenure. The festival’s conductor laureate confirmed with CCR that he will return in 2026.

As for Grant Park’s new artistic director and principal conductor, Giancarlo Guerrero says that he would like to continue to cast as wide a musical net as possible in future seasons.

“My philosophy has always been to try to expose audiences to as many different voices and different composers as possible,” said Guerrero. “I’m a very strong believer that when you play a warhorse like Beethoven Sixth or Mahler One, and you put it next to a new piece by a modern composer, they have the ability to influence each other even more, and being heard through different ears, it may sound new to you again.”

“The whole festival is a combination not just about pieces that are incredibly well known in the repertoire but also a lot of newer voices. And in some cases—like the Hovhaness and lthe Hanson— some voices that in many ways have been been neglected and needed to be brought back again.

“So I always believe you have to find the combination of not just bringing the old stuff with you but you also have to look to the present and to the future. That to me has always been a winning combination.”

Memberships are now on sale. Go to grantparkmusicfestival.com.

FULL ARTICLE HERE