Though Giancarlo Guerrero is barely into his tenure as Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Grant Park Orchestra, he has already signaled how he intends to shape this institution. The 2026 season has leaned into American music, a nod to both the country’s 250th anniversary and the festival’s Depression-era mission of accessibility and civic purpose. The programming has been populist without pandering, and the pairings have been thoughtful. Florence Price, Gabriela Lena Frank, John Corigliano, and Christopher Theofanidis have all appeared on the season, while Michael Daugherty and Julia Wolfe are represented on its final program. On August 12, two works associated with American minimalism shared the bill with Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “From the New World.”

Guerrero has also proved himself a practical conductor. Pritzker Pavilion is a generous civic space but a difficult musical one, with amplification and urban noise conspiring to drown out nuance. His performances have met those challenges head-on. He keeps tempos firm, textures clear, and the orchestra alert. 

This summer, both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Grant Park Orchestra have turned to Dvořák’s Ninth as a kind of origin story, one of the earliest attempts to imagine what an American symphonic voice might sound like. Guerrero underscored that point from the stage during a brief reset between pieces. The point is valid that the symphony gestures toward a homegrown sound, though much of that claim rests on the slow movement and its English horn solo. Anne Bach played it with poise, and Guerrero allowed space for its tenderness and nostalgia. But he didn’t linger. His reading favored momentum and shape, a sensible approach in a venue where subtlety evaporates quickly. The result cast the performance in a mold closer to Dvořák’s earlier symphonies—and less a prophetic American awakening.

The rest of the program traced the end of the century that followed. Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 remains one of the composer’s most durable works. It was his first major orchestral statement, written after years of small‑ensemble experimentation. Soloist Anne Akiko Meyers approached it with a sensibility that massaged the work’s edges to focus its lyrical qualities. The concerto’s repeating cells and shifting colors took on a more traditional glow, as though Glass had stepped, briefly, into the 19th‑century concerto tradition. It was an intriguing reframing, even if it pulled the piece away from its original sense of risk.

John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine opened the evening. Adams turns 80 next year, and the piece, written in 1986, still feels like a distillation of his early style. Its bright orchestration, sharp rhythmic turns, and relentless woodblock create a kind of forward‑tilting exhilaration. Guerrero and the orchestra gave it a taut, energetic reading, one that hinted at the drive they would later bring to Dvořák.

Each work on the program once represented a different idea of what American classical music might become. Dvořák imagined that possibility from the outside; Glass and Adams reshaped it from within. Heard together under the summer sky in downtown Chicago, the pieces no longer sounded revolutionary, but neither did they seem safely settled in the past. They have become part of the musical tradition they helped define.

Originally published on Third Coast Review

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Around Chicago

Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Review

“While Meyers was an ardent Glass advocate, at times she seemed to be trying to inflate the work into a more conventional Romantic showpiece—as with the overemphatic attacks on single-note chords that alternate with the pulsing repetitions. Likewise, the soloist’s slowdown in the concluding section felt excessively drawn out and over-Romanticized; Glass’s quiet coda, while somewhat abrupt, is more characteristic and better suits this idiosyncratic piece.”