Chicago Classical Review: Guerrero, GPO, and Imani Winds serve up variety, celebrate women
By Landon Hegedus
After a (literally) stormy start to the Grant Park Music Festival’s 2025 season, the clouds have parted for Giancarlo Guerrero.
The festival’s new artistic director and principal conductor faced torrential rain and oppressive heat in the first concerts of his premiere season, performing admirably through these less-than-ideal conditions while demonstrating facility in the likes of both hearty European fare and the American repertoire that is his (and the festival’s) stock in trade.
For Wednesday evening’s orchestral program at Millennium Park, Guerrero’s third at the helm this season, the environmental challenges thankfully abated. Fortunately, for those in attendance, the skill and artistic rigor on stage hasn’t in the slightest.
Guerrero is a charismatic conductor, endearing the audience with his onstage commentary and compelling podium presence alike. He’s a pleasure to watch, conducting sans baton throughout the night with deliberate and scrutable direction. Whatever visual refinement it lacks is secondary to the snappy response he achieved with the ensemble.
In Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony (No. 31), Guerrero abstained from beating time throughout much of the exterior movements, opting for restrained gestures to keep the propulsive tempi floating along while saving his more evocative flourishes to highlight the nuances of the symphony’s ebullient themes.
The tossed-off elegance of these performances effectively bookended an experiment in audience engagement for Guerrero.
Mozart wrote two separate slow movements for this symphony, both of which Guerrero included in Wednesday’s performance. “I’m going to need your help with something,” he said to the audience, going on to explain that in Mozart’s time, concertgoers would show their approval of a symphony with exuberant applause between movements—even to the point of prompting an encore of a given movement midway through the piece.
Thus Guerrero introduced the two variants of the middle movement of Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony —the latter composed when the original version didn’t receive the ovation the composer felt it was due at its 1778 premiere—and prompted this audience to show their favor by clapping most vigorously for the version they preferred.
The orchestra’s stylish, polished reading of the Andantino made a worthy case for the original movement, but there was no contest that the latter Andante, though somewhat shaggier in this performance, won Wednesday evening’s audience over with its easygoing lilt and the amiable warmth of its melodies.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis opened the program. Guerrero prefaced the work by noting its antiphonal structure. The piece is scored for a pair of string orchestras and a string quartet that echo one another, in an homage to the Renaissance polyphonic technique common during the namesake composer’s era.
Extracted from the context of a reverberant cathedral, this evening’s interpretation required a more tailored approach. Guerrero’s reading found its mark, serving up equal parts of fine-grained intensity and measured transparency to ensure the Fantasia’s gauzy orchestration achieved its requisite sustain and resonant impact within the al fresco confines.
The Grant Park Orchestra strings were nimble and attentive to Guerrero throughout the evening, playing with rich, full-bored sound both in Mozart’s springy themes and the taut, sonorous lines of the Vaughan Williams. The young Festival String Fellows joined them in the latter as the featured string quartet, matching their peers in the orchestra with sensitivity and gravitas; violin fellow Javier Torres-Delgado showed particularly enchanting solo turns in hushed moments.
The evening’s central offering was a work entitled Phenomenal Women, featuring the venerable woodwind quintet Imani Winds and composed by founding Imani member and former group flutist Valerie Coleman.
Composed in 2018, the work is a portrait gallery of five black women celebrated for their outstanding contributions to their fields: Maya Angelou, Katherine Johnson, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama, and Claressa Shields.
In five of Phenomenal Women’s six movements, those figures are embodied through dynamic solos from each of the quintet’s members (the horn stars as Obama, while the role of Shields, the Olympian boxer who helped illuminate the water crisis in her hometown of Flint, is played by the clarinet). The sixth is an interlude dedicated to migrant mothers who traveled by caravan to faraway lands, only to be separated from their children upon arriving at their expected destination
The opening movement finds the ensemble in conventional concerto grosso form, with all five Imani members slinging spiky motifs into the orchestra’s washes of impressionist orchestral color. The themes of “Maya” trace the contours of three Angelou poems: the rebellious stanzas of “Still I Rise” translate into searing, spunky riffs delivered by the solo clarinet and bassoon, while the subject of “Caged Bird” is summoned through an off-kilter, sing-song melody, before veering into an explicitly jazzy jaunt with “Phenomenal Woman.”
Coleman’s neo-Romantic vernacular borders on the cinematic, and proves a fitting tonal palette for evoking her chosen subjects. The chittering, insistent oboe theme suggests the digital language of binary code while cool peals of brass and percussion evoked the stark beauty of celestial bodies in the second movement, “Katherine Johnson,” named for the NASA mathematician whose manual calculations helped to clinch the success of pioneering space explorations.
The work’s interior movements proved the most effective to this end and suitably empowered the Imani Winds to flex their individual virtuosity. Flutist Brandon Patrick George brought a silvery, billowing quality to the haunting strains of the third movement, “Caravana,” while in the fourth movement — amid woodblock interjections that uncannily resembled the thwack of tennis balls volleying across a court — bassoonist Monica Ellis swaggered with staggering agility and brawny tone befitting Serena Williams’ raw athleticism in a funky, zig-zagging cadenza.