Waiting for summer and the Grant Park Orchestra

It is cold in Chicago—objectively, adamantly cold. An Arctic front has settled over the city, wrapping it in a willful chill. I find myself staying indoors as much as possible, venturing out only tomorrow to Symphony Center to hear Kirill Gerstein in the SCP Piano series. Gerstein has long struck me as a connoisseur of the recondite and the new. His recording of Busoni’s Piano Concerto remains a marvel, and he has been a tireless champion of Thomas Adès. To encounter him in a more traditional program of Liszt and Brahms promises a kind of illumination, the way a familiar landscape can appear unfamiliar when seen from a different vantage point.

The cold has also given me time to begin The Brothers Karamazov as part of my Lenten preparation. Lent is still weeks away, but I read slowly, and the novel’s sprawl requires an early start. In the same unhurried hours, I have finally studied the Grant Park Music Festival’s summer lineup. Summer seems impossibly distant amid the present freeze, but its promise already feels restorative. Giancarlo Guerrero, now in his second season as artistic director and principal conductor, has assembled a season of considerable ambition.

Carlos Kalmar, Guerrero’s predecessor, built a reputation for inventive programming, both here and with the Oregon Symphony. He delighted in juxtapositions that caught the ear and in works that appealed chiefly to the initiated. His 2011 “Music for a Time of War” program at the Spring for Music festival in Carnegie Hall drew high praise from Alex Ross at the time. Guerrero is no less purposeful. 

In the 2026 season, conveniently coinciding with the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the United States, he balances crowd-pleasing staples with a substantial concentration of American music. Our national politics are in disarray, civility frayed, basic decencies under strain, yet the creative inheritance of the country need not suffer the same fate. Guerrero has leaned into the occasion without apology. The American offerings stand out for their range and seriousness. One could almost call it defiant.

There is Aaron Copland’s grand Third Symphony, the nearest thing we have to a canonical “great” American symphony. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1, too long overlooked, shares space with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto, a work whose vitality ought to place it more firmly in the repertory. Third Coast Percussion will perform Theofanidis’s Drum Circle. Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 appears as well. Price’s music can sometimes feel as though it needs a few more bars to fully coalesce, but the ongoing rediscovery of her voice is one of the genuine pleasures of recent years. John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, which received its première from the Chicago Symphony in 1990, returns under Guerrero in a summer pairing with Mozart’s Requiem. Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 stands alongside Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony and John Adams’s A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, that perpetual-motion machine of minimalism.

And for those who prefer to sidestep the American emphasis, there is a program of Elgar’s In the South, Stravinsky’s Jeu de cartes, and Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto—sunny, jaunty, unabashedly romantic, all the things winter is not.

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John Corigliano on his Symphony No.1