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Concert review

Downpour doesn’t dampen Guerrero’s exuberant Grant Park Festival debut

Thu Jun 19, 2025 at 11:54 am

By Lawrence A. Johnson

Giancarlo Guerrero conducted the Grant Park Orchestra Wednesday night in his first concert as artistic director of the lakefront festival. Photo: Elliot Mandel

“Good evening, everyone. What a glorious night!”

Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero was being ironic in his spoken remarks Wednesday evening at Millennium Park. For awhile it looked like the day’s rain was going to clear up in time for Guerrero’s first appearance in his role as the Grant Park Music Festival’s new artistic director and principal conductor.

Yet the weather gods were not beneficent on this occasion, and the drizzly weather turned into a downpour shortly after the concert began. The rain continued unabated and intensified for the duration, emptying the lawn of audience members, as the hardy concert regulars who remained huddled under umbrellas or found shelter under Frank Gehry’s leaky, billowing steel sails. This was one time nobody complained about the short, hour-long program.

Even with the evening’s deluge, the music-making by the Grant Park Orchestra musicians was unaffected, with Guerrero leading energetic, polished performances to launch his inaugural season as the festival’s new chief conductor.

Following Carlos Kalmar’s distinguished quarter-century helming the lakefront festival is no easy task. Yet Guerrero seems well placed to succeed his popular predecessor. The Costa Rican conductor showed himself an amiable presence in his user-friendly, spoken introduction to the program—more necessary now since the festival is, inexplicably, continuing the self-defeating policy of eliminating concert programs.

Most importantly, as Guerrero stated in a CCR interview at the time of the season announcement, he is committed to continuing the festival’s established mix of core repertory with contemporary works and American music, past and present. Indeed, this summer’s schedule will bring rarely heard 20th-century homegrown symphonies by Howard Hanson and Alan Hovhaness, as well as American music of more recent vintage, such as Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs.

Guerrero’s first program of the summer was in that same festival tradition with two American works framing a cornerstone concerto Wednesday night.

Mendelssohn wrote his Violin Concerto for Ferdinand David, concertmaster of his Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. And so it was wholly apt that Jeremy Black was in the solo spotlight for Mendelssohn‘s beloved concerto, as the violinist marks his 20th anniversary season as Grant Park Orchestra concertmaster.

Jeremy Black performed Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto Wednesday night. Photo: Elliot Mandel

Making an impression in this most familiar of concertos is a difficult assignment. Yet Black managed to do just that, delivering a technically immaculate performance—despite the meteorological distractions—that was also fresh and distinctive.

Black’s pure, luminous tone fell gratefully on the ears throughout. He consistently drew out Mendelssohn’s lilting lyricism with an individual touch of rubato, as with a beguiling rendering of the Andante. The soloist brought virtuosic, acutely focused playing to the bravura passages, rounding off the performance with a fleet and stylish romp through the spirited finale. Guerrero and Black’s colleagues lent alert, full-bodied accompaniment with fiery tuttis.

Adolphus Hailstork is the dean of black American composers.  He is still busily working at age 84, as shown by the premiere of his Symphony No. 5 in Washington DC in 2023.

Hailstork’s An American Port of Call (1984) led off the program. Norfolk served as the inspiration for the Virginia-based composer in this well-crafted, energetic work. Tuttis were a bit congested in some of the more thickly scored passages, where a clarifying of lines would have been helped. That apart, Guerrero led a vital and exuberant performance of Hailstork’s snappily scored overture in its festival premiere.

Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront closed the soggy evening. Bernstein’s finest works originate from drama, be it the stage (West Side Story, Candide) or movies in the case of On the Waterfront.

Elia Kazan’s still-powerful 1955 tale of labor union corruption on the New Jersey docks boasts a remarkable ensemble cast led by Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. Although Bernstein’s edgy, jazz-inflected score is enormously effective in the movie, the composer was furious about the way his music was cut and edited in the final film; he vowed to never write another film score and he never did.

Bernstein’s On the Waterfront Suite restores some music trimmed from the film but works as a substantial work in its own right as a single-movement symphony.

If the opening section felt somewhat garrulous and louder than necessary—or was amplified as such—Guerrero soon showed himself an idiomatic Bernstein hand. The conductor deftly balanced the score’s contrasting elements and drew out the lonely urban melancholy—reflected in the tender flute theme, rendered with a fragile, searching quality by acting principal flute Jennifer Lawson. 

The fast, jazzy sections went with explosive intensity under Guerrero’s direction, the rain’s rhythmic drumbeat on one’s umbrella providing an obbligato addition to Bernstein’s hard-driving percussion. Guerrero drew the threads together skillfully, as the Grant Park musicians’ playing rose to the tough yet affirmative, hard-won apotheosis.

Giancarlo Guerrero leads the Grant Park Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, Clarice Assad’s Baião N’ Blues, and Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño with trumpet soloist Pacho Flores 6:30 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday. gpmf.org

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Grant Park Orchestra
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor
Pacho Flores, trumpet […]


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