Chicago Classical Review

A fast-moving storm with up to 80-mph winds caused serious damage in the suburbs and blew out some South Loop high-rise windows late Wednesday afternoon. Fortunately, the dangerous weather and rain receded just before curtain time, allowing the season-opening concert of the Grant Park Music Festival to take place on schedule.

Giancarlo Guerrero seems fated to deal with extreme weather (or the threat of it) on his opening nights. One year ago, Guerrero’s debut concert in his inaugural season as the lakefront festival’s artistic director and principal conductor took place under a nonstop deluge.

Like most of the festival’s Wednesday concerts, the American program that opened Grant Park’s 92nd season was short on duration with less than an hour of music, padded out with Guerrero’s engaging and user-friendly introductions. 

That informed historical background was likely even more appreciated by patrons since the festival’s controversial jettisoning of program notes and, often, essential information, is apparently here to stay. (As last season, one is forced to access Katherine Buzard’s excellent notes online via smartphone.)

That apart, with a contemporary work, a populist favorite and a semi-neglected symphony the deftly varied homegrown program made an apt kickoff to the festival’s America 250 lineup this summer, reflecting, in Guerrero’s words, an exploration of the meaning of “American music.”

Following a stirring rendition of the National Anthem, the evening opened with Made in America by Joan Tower. Still writing music at age 87, Tower’s 2005 work—a commission performed by smaller orchestras in all 50 states—takes “America, the Beautiful” as its primary source material.

After an initial statement of part of the song’s famous theme, a strident brass chord abruptly interrupts its progress. The music segues into a malign, motoric section, a sense of driving desperation that continues. A lyrical fragment of the song appears, as if trying to emerge from the off-kilter oscillations. The theme is continually undermined, at one point transformed into an aggressive, even violent metamorphosis. While the theme, in Tower’s word,  “perseveres,” much like the country, the coda of the 13-minute work, accompanied by thundering timpani, closes on an emphatic if hardly affirmative note.

Made in America is crafted and scored with characteristic skill. Guerrero and the Grant Park Orchestra delivered a well-prepared, muscular performance, their compelling advocacy making the best possible case for Tower’s piece.

Leonard Bernstein‘s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story needs no introduction yet that didn’t prevent Guerrero from giving one anyway. (His background info included the interesting tidbit that the 1960 premiere of the suite by the New York Philharmonic was conducted, not by Bernstein, but by Lukas Foss.) 

Guerrero led a lively, high stepping performance that—if not the last word in subtlety—provided fizzing energy and frenzied rhythmic drive. There was an apt jazzy edge to “Cool,” propulsive urban punch to “The Rumble” and Terpsichorean exuberance in the “Dance at the Gym” (aided by raucous “Mambo!” shouts from the audience after some brief pre-coaching by the conductor). Passing debits were a shaky horn solo in “Somewhere” and the percussion contingent covering the stratospheric trumpet solo in “Dance at the Gym.” In a well-timed bit of al fresco beneficence by the meteorological gods, the sun poked through the clouds in the final section, adding an extra consolatory warmth to “I Have a Love” and the glowing reprise of “Somewhere.”

It took over a half-century for Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto to enter the regular concert repertory. Happily, the composer’s excellent, long-neglected Symphony No. 1, which concluded the evening, seems to be finally coming in from the cold as well.

Barber’s First Symphony is one of the indisputably great works in the genre by an American composer, characteristic in its concise blend of impassioned drama and elegiac lyricism, Barber artfully compacting four connected sections into a single 21-minute movement.

Guerrero led the Grant Park musicians in an effective and powerful performance that would have benefited from greater tonal refinement, a wider and more nuanced dynamic range and less overblown climaxes (often a conductor’s Achilles heel as a former percussionist). 

The Grant Park strings and winds were impressively nimble in the scherzo section, Guerrero drawing admirable clarity in the ensuing fugue. Barber invariably gives his best tunes to the oboe, and assistant principal Anne Bach contributed an idiomatic sad-stoic expression to her solo in the Andante tranquillo, fluently handling the long-phrased melody.

The Grant Park Music Festival continues with Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, Ives’ Variations on America, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s Conquest Requiem 6:30 p.m. Friday and 7:30 p.m. Saturday. gpmf.org

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