Chicago Classical Review

Tue Jan 06, 2026 at 6:00 am

The Grant Park Music Festival will serve up one of its most adventurous seasons in years in 2026, the first summer fully programmed by Giancarlo Guerrero.

Succeeding the popular Carlos Kalmar after his 25-year tenure was an unenviable task. But in his first season as artistic director and principal conductor, Guerrero quickly built a strong rapport with the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus last summer, as well as with the festival’s discerning audience.

“It was beyond my wildest dreams,” said the affable conductor  from his Florida home. “I knew it was going to be special. But being there for five weeks was wonderful with so many different programs, so much music and so many different settings.”

“And so much different weather!” he recalled with a laugh. “The humidity, the 90 degrees, the rain, the storms!” 

In addition to the talents of the musicians, Guerrero said he was also greatly impressed by the professionalism and efficiency of the Grant Park administration and staff. 

“Seeing how the festival is so well run on a day-to-day basis was impressive,” he said. “Not only the players and the choir, but the staff, the stage managers, the ushers. It was remarkable how they have perfected this incredible festival. You can see that there is great degree of pride from everyone.”

Guerrero said his only disappointment is that festival CEO Paul Winberg is retiring this spring and he won’t be able to collaborate with him in future seasons. “Paul is a dear friend and dear colleague. I would have loved to work with him for a few more years. With Paul retiring, they are going to have some very big shoes to fill.”

Guerrero said that he felt his already promising relationship with the Grant Park musicians growing with each concert last summer. “My relationship with the orchestra was absolutely remarkable. It was a reaffirmation of what I felt in my first concerts the season before.”

“Already I feel that the chemistry is there to the point that I don’t have to say much,” he said, adding that the partnership is a continuum of sorts. “To me this season will be a continuation of last season and a building block for the next season.”

Marking the nation’s 250th birthday this year, Guerrero has ensured that there will be an even wider and more diverse array of American music past and present than usual, with several rarities on tap.

Guerrero will open the 2026 lakefront concert series June 10 with a homegrown program featuring music of Joan Tower (Made in America), Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1.

Other American works to be led by Guerrero in his five weeks of concerts include Gabriela Lena Frank’s Conquest Requiem, Copland’s Symphony No. 3, John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (with Anne Akiko Meyers)  Charles Ives’ Variations on America, and shorter works by John Adams, Julia Perry, and Reena Esmail. Guerrero will conclude the season August 14-15 with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, which will be preceded by Julia Wolfe’s Liberty Bell and Michael Daugherty’s Mount Rushmore.

Guerrero said he gave a great deal of thought as to how best to musically mark the nation’s 250th anniversary year. And he concluded that a lot of cornerstone European rep actually fits into the much-debated “American music” bailiwick.

“You have a lot of the obvious people that people think of when they say ‘American composers,'” said Guerrero. “Barber, Bernstein, Copland, etc..”

“The question that I was asking myself, is What is ‘American music’? What is an ‘American composer’? Rachmaninoff had a U.S. passport but we never really think of him as an American pianist-composer.”

“But there are so many other people—Stravinsky, Hindemith, Dvořák—who made their lives and their careers or were inspired by the United States. Tchaikovsky conducted the opening of Carnegie Hall, which most people are not aware of.” 

“I was born in Nicaragua and grew up in Costa Rica. I have a U.S. passport and I’m a U.S citizen, and so I’m an American conductor.”

“So, it’s a way of rethinking what the American experiment of 250 years means in classical music. We wanted to do not just the usual suspects of American music but other composers who were heavily influenced and inspired by the United States and the season reflects a lot of that.”

“I think nearly every program has a direct connection about  the United States as an ideal—a place of refuge for many people who were escaping difficult situations, particularly in the 20th century with both world wars.”

Among the works Guerrero feels strongly about this season is Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1. Commissioned and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1990, it is a powerful, elegiac work motivated by the loss of many of the composer’s friends to AIDS.

“The AIDS epidemic was a big part of American history,” said Guerrero. “John wrote about these people that were affected by AIDS and really immortalized them. For me, it’s really one of the great American 20th-century symphonies.” Guerrero has paired the symphony with the Mozart Requiem, which nicely contrasts contemporary and traditional liturgical responses to suffering and death.

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Two previous Grant Park principal conductors will return this summer. On July 1 & 3 Carlos Kalmar leads a program that will offer Elgar’s In the South, Stravinsky’s Jeu de Cartes and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with soloist Olga Kern. Kalmar’s second program, on July 8, offers Sibelius’s Symphony No, 2 and Christopher Theofanidis’s Drum Circle, with Third Coast Percussion.

Leonard Slatkin, who was the festival’s chief conductor in 1974-75 and a regular podium guest thereafter, will lead a program July 10-11 with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, Slatkin’s own Schubertiade: An Orchestral Fantasy, and Joseph Schwantner’s Violin Concerto with soloist Yevgeny Kutik.

Other soloists this summer include cellist Oliver Herbert, violinists Will Hagen, Gabriele Lara, and Jeremy Black; pianists Garrick Ohlsson, Stewart Goodyear, Michelle Cann, and Sara Davis Buechner; and vocalists Jessica Rivera, Andrew Garland, Janai Brugger, Sankara Harouna, Susan Platts, Andrew Hall, Kelly Markgraf, Karen Slack, Mara Miles, John Matthew Myers, and Jongwon Han.

Other guest conductors are Christopher Bell, Kalena Bovell, Jeri-Lynne Johnson, Edwin Outwater, and Kedrick Armstrong.

There will also be an evening with Ben Folds, a Broadway program, and a performance by Troupe Vertigo.

“I look forward to many more years of exploring—not only the warhorses that we all love but quite a lot of American music,” said Guerrero.

“Having a really world-class orchestra and chorus in front of me, there are endless possibilities to what we can do.”

Festival memberships are now on sale at grantparkmusicfestival.com

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