Giancarlo Guerrero
The Grant Park Music Festival Announces 2025 Season with New Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero
The Grant Park Music Festival announced its 2025 season—one that already carries the stamp of Giancarlo Guerrero, its new music director.
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 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 27–28 and August 1–2).
The season reflects Guerrero’s interest in contemporary American fare—and, broadly, the festival’s, 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’s 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’s co-commissioner (August 13).
Other recently written works fill out the season, most of them regional and city premieres. Those include Rockford-born Jake Runestad’s Earth Symphony (June 13), Chicago-based Clarice Assad’s Baião N’ Blues, Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño for Venezuelan trumpeter Pacho Flores (both June 20–21), Henry Dorn’s Transitions (July 2–3), and Brian Nabors’ Pulse, originally commissioned by Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony in 2019 (August 1–2).
Also included are pieces from the 21st-century canon that have evaded Illinois—until now. Receiving belated area premieres are Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs (August 1–2)—written for the late, great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and here sung by J’Nai Bridges—and Jennifer Higdon’s The Singing Rooms, featuring commissioning violinist Jennifer Koh (August 8–9). Somehow, so is Margaret Bonds’ choral-orchestral Credo, despite the late composer’s Chicago bona fides (July 11–12).
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But he’ll 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’s An American Port of Call and Leonard Bernstein’s On the Waterfront suite—both of which were no-brainers, he says, as “two great American works”—and concertmaster Jeremy Black in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Black’s 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.
“It’s a combination of the new and the old—him being with the orchestra for years, and me coming in. It will be a great privilege,” Guerrero says.
Guerrero also leads the festival’s Carmina Burana finale on August 15–16. (If you’re getting déjà vu, it’s not just you: the choral-orchestral blockbuster also closed the 2018 festival.) Joining it is Alan Hovhaness’ Mysterious Mountain, the most famous of the prolific Armenian American composer’s many symphonies.
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Guerrero says the preponderance of local premieres this season wasn’t necessarily intentional—they were works he gravitated toward, only to find out they had never been heard in Chicago, or in most cases, Illinois generally. It’s convinced him that he’s on the right programming track already.
“Like the Duruflé (Requiem) last season, you get to hear this music and say, ‘Why haven’t I heard this before?’” he says. “It is our duty as musicians, as institutions, to expose our audiences to what’s out there.”