For Giancarlo Guerrero, starting a serious new submit in Chicago as creative director and principal conductor of the Grant Park Music Competition is like coming house.
Chicago was the place the Grammy Award-winning Costa Rican conductor solidified his foothold in america and obtained his important coaching as a conductor on the toes of Victor Yampolsky, Northwestern College’s now-retired director of orchestras.
“Altogether, Chicago was actually the place that basically pushed me not solely as a conductor however as a musician total and confirmed me what the probabilities may very well be,” he stated.
The Grant Park Music Competition introduced Guerrero’s appointment in October, and he’ll lead his first live performance on June 18 — a program that culminates with the “Symphonic Suite” from Leonard Bernstein’s rating for the acclaimed 1954 movie “On the Waterfront.”
This 12 months’s installment of the 10-week summer time classical-music collection, which options the Grant Park Orchestra and Refrain and visitor soloists from around the globe, opens Wednesday and runs via Aug. 16.
The pageant dates to 1935, when symphonic choices in Grant Park turned an annual custom. It selected to maintain its well-recognized identify when it moved its choices in 2004 to then-newly opened Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
Guerrero, 56, ended his 16-year tenure in Could as music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, the place he put an emphasis on modern American music and oversaw greater than 20 recordings that earned him six Grammy Awards.
Guerrero replaces one other conductor with Latin American ties, Carlos Kalmar, who was born in Uruguay to Austrian Jewish dad and mom. Kalmar stepped down on the finish of Grant Park’s 2024 season after 25 seasons, assuming the title of conductor laureate.
The pageant signed Guerrero to a three-year contract with 4 weeks of concert events every summer time.
Paul Winberg, the pageant’s president and chief government officer, had stated the group was on the lookout for a conductor who might obtain a “magical alchemy” with the forces onstage and audiences.
Guerrero, who first appeared on the pageant in 2008, returned final July for 2 back-to-back packages that served as his tryout. He stated instantly felt a rapport with the pageant musicians.
“You get in entrance of an orchestra, and also you give your downbeat on the first rehearsal, and, , the magic begins occurring,” he stated. “There’s something concerning the connection that you simply really feel with the gamers, and also you begin making music.”
Guerrero praised the pageant’s free-admission coverage and its adventurous programming. Kalmar offset acquainted classics with intriguing mixtures of latest and strange works from the previous — a defining hallmark of his tenure — and Guerrero plans to do a lot the identical.
“I’m bringing my very own repertoire,” he stated, noting that each conductor has favourite items and a “bucket listing” of ones they nonetheless wish to do. The secret is context. “Simply programming for the sake that ‘I prefer it,’ that’s not sufficient. It has to have a message, whether or not its a programmatic or stylistic message or one thing that holds a program collectively.”
He stated he’s additionally aiming to proceed to the pageant’s longtime emphasis on American repertoire however desires to attract on his expertise as former music director of the Wrocław Philharmonic in Poland and former principal visitor conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon to current extra fashionable and modern European works, particularly from Poland, Germany and France.
Like his predecessors, Guerrero stated he hopes to highlight works that showcase the pageant’s skilled refrain, which he stated refrain director Christopher Bell has constructed into “one thing fairly particular.”
He’s significantly wanting ahead to the summer time’s culminating concert events Aug. 15 and 16, that includes the refrain in Carl Orff’s thundering masterwork “Carmina Burana.” “It’s a such a riot to conduct, to listen to and to play.”
Different works he’s enthusiastic about this summer time embody Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan,” on June 20 and 21 in a uncommon model that can embody a bit titled “Blumine” that was included in early performances and later eliminated, and Jennifer Higdon’s “The Singing Rooms” on Aug. 8 and 9.
Guerrero is at a serious transitional level in his life and profession. Now that his youngsters are out of the home, he and his spouse are transferring to a condominium in Miami they purchased when he served from 2011 to 2016 as principal visitor conductor for the Cleveland Orchestra’s annual residency there.
Born in Nicaragua, Guerrero fled along with his household when he was 11 to Costa Rica following the civil battle and performed within the Costa Rica Youth Symphony and Costa Rican Nationwide Symphony Orchestra.
He moved to america to review percussion at Baylor College in Texas, the place he took a compulsory conducting class when he was junior and the place, a lot to his shock, a professor instructed him that he appeared to have a pure expertise for it.
Alongside along with his persevering with percussion research, he was accepted into the conducting program at Northwestern College, the place he bought his grasp’s diploma in 1992. “Coming from Waco to Chicago was a shock,” he stated.
He was enthralled with having the ability to recurrently hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — which he has since visitor carried out thrice — from fall to spring and attend the Grant Park Competition throughout summers. “Suddenly, the world of music opened up earlier than my eyes,” he stated.
He referred to as Yampolsky, who performed violin within the Moscow Philharmonic and Boston Symphony and held 5 music directorships, “one of many biggest musicians” he has ever identified. He stated the trainer helped Guerrero shed unhealthy habits and be taught what it takes mentally and bodily to be a conductor.
Greater than 30 years since incomes his Northwestern diploma, Guerrero is returning to Chicago to start a brand new chapter. Kalmar supplied this dvice concerning the Grant Park job to whomever succeeded him: “Take it, run with it, and put your personal stamp on it.”
That’s precisely what Guerrero intends to do.
