The Grant Park Music Festival announced its 2025 season\u2014one that already carries the stamp of Giancarlo Guerrero, its new music director.<\/p>\n
From the Chicago Tribune<\/a><\/p>\n By Hannah Edgar<\/p>\n This summer, the free music festival runs June 11 to August 16, with the usual Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evening programs. All concerts will be held at Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, with the exception of two chorus concerts at the South Shore Cultural Center (June 26 and 30) and a few retreats to Harris Theater to avoid noise pollution from other Grant Park programming (June 27\u201328 and August 1\u20132).<\/p>\n The season reflects Guerrero’s interest in contemporary American fare\u2014and, broadly, the festival\u2019s, as a longtime programming plank of former director Carlos Kalmar. Chicago composer Stacy Garrop has been commissioned to write a new work for the festival\u2019s String Fellow Quartet, inspired by the Pritzker Pavilion (date to be announced). The orchestra also gives the Midwest premiere of Chelsea Komschlies’ Mycelialore as the piece\u2019s co-commissioner (August 13).<\/p>\n Other recently written works fill out the season, most of them regional and city premieres. Those include Rockford-born Jake Runestad\u2019s Earth Symphony (June 13), Chicago-based Clarice Assad\u2019s Bai\u00e3o N’ Blues, Arturo M\u00e1rquez\u2019s Concierto de Oto\u00f1o for Venezuelan trumpeter Pacho Flores (both June 20\u201321), Henry Dorn\u2019s Transitions (July 2\u20133), and Brian Nabors\u2019 Pulse, originally commissioned by Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony in 2019 (August 1\u20132).<\/p>\n Also included are pieces from the 21st-century canon that have evaded Illinois\u2014until now. Receiving belated area premieres are Peter Lieberson\u2019s Neruda Songs (August 1\u20132)\u2014written for the late, great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and here sung by J\u2019Nai Bridges\u2014and Jennifer Higdon\u2019s The Singing Rooms, featuring commissioning violinist Jennifer Koh (August 8\u20139). Somehow, so is Margaret Bonds\u2019 choral-orchestral Credo, despite the late composer\u2019s Chicago bona fides (July 11\u201312).<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n But he\u2019ll lead a lot of it. Guerrero conducts eight of the 20 planned festival programs, after shuffling some commitments to spend more time with the Grant Parkers. His first program on June 18 features Adolphus Hailstork\u2019s An American Port of Call and Leonard Bernstein\u2019s On the Waterfront suite\u2014both of which were no-brainers, he says, as \u201ctwo great American works\u201d\u2014and concertmaster Jeremy Black in Mendelssohn\u2019s Violin Concerto. Black\u2019s musicianship and camaraderie made such an impression on Guerrero during his trial weeks last summer that he specifically requested to conduct the Mendelssohn, which was already in the books.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a combination of the new and the old\u2014him being with the orchestra for years, and me coming in. It will be a great privilege,\u201d Guerrero says.<\/p>\n Guerrero also leads the festival\u2019s Carmina Burana finale on August 15\u201316. (If you\u2019re getting d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, it\u2019s not just you: the choral-orchestral blockbuster also closed the 2018 festival.) Joining it is Alan Hovhaness\u2019 Mysterious Mountain, the most famous of the prolific Armenian American composer\u2019s many symphonies.<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n Guerrero says the preponderance of local premieres this season wasn\u2019t necessarily intentional\u2014they were works he gravitated toward, only to find out they had never been heard in Chicago, or in most cases, Illinois generally. It\u2019s convinced him that he\u2019s on the right programming track already.<\/p>\n \u201cLike the Durufl\u00e9 (Requiem) last season, you get to hear this music and say, \u2018Why haven\u2019t I heard this before?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cIt is our duty as musicians, as institutions, to expose our audiences to what\u2019s out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Read the full story<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Grant Park Music Festival announced its 2025 season\u2014one that already carries the stamp of Giancarlo Guerrero, its new music director. From the Chicago Tribune By Hannah Edgar This summer, the free music festival runs June 11 to August 16, with the usual Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evening programs. All concerts will be held at … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3613,3611,4249,4585,3686],"class_list":["post-16194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-conductor","tag-festival","tag-giancarlo-guerrero","tag-music-director","tag-orchestra"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16195,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16194\/revisions\/16195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/14876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}