Chicago Classical Review

Giancarlo Guerrero’s first concert as artistic director and principal conductor of the Grant Park Music Festival proved impressive as much for perseverance as musical results, taking place during a virtual monsoon.

On Friday night at the Pritzker Pavilion, the Costa Rican conductor provided even stronger notice of his podium bona fides. Guerrero led a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 that, while not always technically flawless, was a formidable achievement by any measure. The conductor revealed himself a gifted and idiomatic Mahlerian, insightful yet individual and willing to take risks.

That much was clear in the novel presentation of Mahler’s most popular work. Guerrero led the First Symphony in its original five-movement form, which is rarely heard today. After the Budapest premiere in 1889, Mahler excised the slow movement he titled “Blumine” (Flowers) from the score. This week’s Grant Park concerts present a rare opportunity to experience Mahler’s first thoughts in this symphony with the original second movement restored.

Blumine is a lovely idyll, cast in Mahler’s best lyrical manner. It is shorter at seven minutes and less deeply probing than many of his later slow movements—not least the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony—as well as more lightly scored. 

Many maintain that the published version is more convincing overall, but that may be due as much to its familiarity than its tauter structure. Hearing it Friday night—in a work one has heard countless times—I felt that the slow movement gives the First Symphony an extra weight and dimension. Plus the callback to the Blumine theme in the final movement gains additional gravitas and significance with its restoration. (The trumpet-led cantilena of Blumine had a surprising Latin flavor in this performance, perhaps inevitable coming after the music on the first half.). Guerrero led a heartfelt rendering of the slow movement, avoiding inflating its scale while making it fit seamlessly with the surrounding movements.

For the rest of the symphony, Guerrero showed himself a fine, straightforward Mahler interpreter in the traditional vein. The hushed opening bars of the first movement were largely lost to al fresco noises but the performance quickly got on track and proved wholly compelling from there on. Guerrero drew out the lyrical nostalgia with breadth without excessive emotionalism, brought a nautical elan to the Scherzo, and nicely assayed the nocturnal weirdness of the fourth movement, the various episodes floating by as if in a dream.

Guerrero kept the final movement on track and avoided peaking too soon, building inexorably to the rousing victory of the final bars. If one felt the reins held a bit too tightly in the closing section, where one wants a greater sense of release and wild abandon, the payoff was no less exciting.

One horn player appeared to be having a rough night but, for the most part, the playing of the Grant Park Orchestra was committed, polished and idiomatic, wholly in synch with Mahler’s vision and singular style. Chicagoans love their Mahler and it is reassuring to know that another fine interpreter of the composer will continue the lakefront festival’s strong Mahler tradition.

The first half, comprised of Latin-American music, was in a lighter vein and made for more variable rewards.

It was good to finally hear a work by the talented Arturo Márquez other than his omnipresent Danzón No. 2. Trumpeter Pacho Flores was the soloist in the Mexican composer’s Concierto de Otoño (Autumn Concerto), written in 2018.

A varied range of Latin American musical influences are palpable in this 20-minute work, one well suited to Flores’ populist style. The trumpet’s martial theme in the Cuban-influenced first movement suggests a matador entering the bullring, while the sinuous melody of the second melody presents a graceful love song. The Cuban influence returns in the finale, with fast, snappy syncopations that seem to channel the infectious dance-band music of Ernesto Leucona. While a lightness of being dominates, Marquez’s score is unerringly crafted and made a worthy showpiece for Flores, its only begetter.

Flores showed himself a first-class musician and characterful advocate for Marquez’s concerto, one of several he has commissioned for the trumpet. Switching between a quartet of instruments (trumpet in C, flugelhorn, soprano cornet in F, and trumpet in D), the Venezuelan trumpeter was a versatile wonder with his bright, evenly produced clarion sound, whether blazing through lightning virtuosic passages, floating a cantabile line, or making humorous growls in an ad libitum cadenza. Guerrero and company provided alert and equally animated accompaniment.

Light as it is, Marquez’s concerto seemed like Moses und Aron next to Flores’s own schmaltzy pieces, which framed the concerto. The trumpeter’s lyrical playing was as assured as in the concerto but not enough to disguise the thinness of inspiration in his Morocota and Lábios Vermelhos (performed as an encore), which presented nothing more than Latin-pop fluff.

More musical substance was had with Clarice Assad’s Baião N’Blues, which led off the evening. Commissioned by Austin’s classical radio station KMFA, this 2023 work by the prolific Brazilian composer made for a well-crafted and engaging curtain-raiser, if not a very individual one. 

While Assad calls Baião N’Blues a fusion of Brazilian and American music, the unspoken primary influence seems to be Leonard Bernstein. In fact, one could call Baião N’Blues one of the best pieces Bernstein never wrote. The American composer’s urban style and jazz-inflected influences permeate this nine-minute showpiece with palpable echoes of On the Town, West Side Story and On the Waterfront all dropping by to say olá.

Derivative as it may be, Assad’s piece received spirited, high-stepping advocacy by Guerrero and the GPO. The composer, currently resident in Chicago, was in attendance and warmly applauded for her music (as well as mobbed by well-wishers at intermission).

One realizes it is early days this summer but the festival’s sound system clearly still needs adjustment. On Wednesday the amplification was too loud, but Friday night felt like an overcorrection with the sound too tamped down as well as unevenly balanced. The double-bass solo in the Mahler was nearly inaudible and odd stage noises, scrapes and rustling, were intermittently heard as if someone had left a stage mic on.

The program will be repeated 8 pm. Saturday. gpmf.org

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