Chicago Classical Review

Giancarlo Guerrero returned to Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion Wednesday night to lead the final two weeks of his second season at the helm of the Grant Park Orchestra.

Two colorful orchestral postcards framed Wednesday’s program. The first was Juan Pablo Contreras’ Mariachitlián (“Mariachiland”), a ten-minute evocation of the competing mariachi bands heard in the Plaza de los Mariachis in Guadalajara, the birthplace of both the genre and the 38-year-old composer (as well as tequila, the composer noted in his introduction).

Mariachitlián has been enormously popular since its 2016 premiere, even receiving a Latin Grammy nomination, and this first performance by the GPO made clear why. Infectious slides and ecstatic jangling set the scene of competing outdoor bands, rendered with vivid, inventive orchestration.

A lyrical central section with plaintive wind solos was sensitively rendered Wednesday by Guerrero and colleagues, serving as a reminder that mariachi music is not uniformly high-spirited. This gives way to an almost minimalist episode with the violas strumming pizzicatos, Contreras intelligently rendering his folkish source material in a contemporary orchestral idiom.

A police whistle unsuccessfully tries to silence the jubilant mash-up before the work charges to its emphatic conclusion. Guerrero was fully in sync with the flair of Mariachitlián, to which the audience vigorously responded, rising to its feet for the orchestra and composer.

Wednesday’s concert closed with Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio italien, and one could hear the affinity between this work and Contreras’ spanning the 135 years between them, with Tchaikovsky rendering the street music he heard on an Italian sojourn as a vibrant medley.

Light rain appeared as the Tchaikovsky got underway, so the usual audience jostling for seats under Frank Gehry’s waves somewhat distracted from its opening trumpet fanfare. Nonetheless, the performance quickly settled, with Guerrero fully projecting its charms.

The conductor brought a fluent rubato to its stately bardic melody, and built the ensuing coquettish street song into a raucous tutti. The swirling final tarantella raced precipitously to the work’s rousing finish.

The evening’s centerpiece was Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 featuring regular Grant Park guest Garrick Ohlsson. Ohlsson rose to prominence as the first American to win Warsaw’s International Chopin Piano Competition in 1970, and his performance Wednesday made clear why he has remained such a vaunted interpreter of Chopin’s music for over half a century.

Following a broad orchestral introduction, Ohlsson rendered his opening solo statement with ambiguity, the implications of which he plumbed as the movement unfolded, eloquently spinning Chopin’s elaborations of his material. The pianist played with an autumnal clarity that evinced a lifetime spent with this repertoire. While there might have been a certain panache lacking at dramatic moments, Ohlsson also felt no need to manufacture fireworks where it did not serve the score.

The rapt expression of the Largo was palpable, its poetry seeming to silence the fitfully restive Grant Park audience, even if Guerrero’s generally responsive accompaniment felt somewhat stiff in places. The final Allegro vivace, a Polish mazurka, felt rather subdued and might have benefited from a more virtuosic approach at times, but Ohlsson’s quicksilver coda and final skipping gesture to the top of the keyboard made clear that his powers have hardly diminished.

Ohlsson offered Chopin’s Nocturne in F-sharp Major, Op. 15, no. 2 as an encore. To take nothing away from the GPO’s efforts, in Chopin’s music an orchestra sometimes feels like a hindrance to conveying the Polish composer’s essence. Ohlsson created an entire world in this limpid solo miniature, conveying its nuanced subtleties with rare artistry. 

Giancarlo Guerrero leads the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus in John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 and the Mozart Requiem 6:30 p.m. Friday and 7:30 p.m. Saturday. grantparkmusicfestival.com

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