Hyde Park Herald: A glorious opening night for the Grant Park Music Festival in Millennium Park
“It was a powerful and delightful performance with Giancarlo Guerrero, artistic director and principal conductor of the Grant Park Symphony and Chorus, ensuring that the music had both muscle and grace.”
M.L. Rantala, Classical Music Critic, Jun 15, 2026
The Grant Park Music Festival opened its 2026 season last Wednesday at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park with an all-American program. Throughout the summer there will be strong representation of American composers in the organization’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Joan Tower (b. 1938) was the composer whose work opened this year’s festival. In 2004 she was commissioned by the Ford Made in America Consortium, a group of 65 small American orchestras representing all 50 states, to write a work that each member orchestra would perform in the months after its completion. Tower decided to use "America the Beautiful” as her touchstone. “Made in America” features quotations from “America the Beautiful,” but these are brief enough that were you completely unfamiliar with it, Tower’s piece would still have remarkable power and charm.
The music opens quietly, like a quiet hum, and develops the simplicity and reverence of a hymn. After this calm, Tower creates music that suggests an almost otherworldly quality that I believe is her signal to the listener that she is moving back in time so that we experience the history of the United States through music.
The genius of this score is that it creates no one event in sharp relief. Instead, it has a single thread that winds and wanders, exploring a range of characteristics upon which we can place our own interpretations. The hustle and bustle of intense energy might represent pioneers moving west. It might represent the explosion of business in the Industrial Age. It might represent the activity of great cities. There are bursts of sound that might bring to mind the expansion of railroads and telegraph lines over thousands of miles linking up a wide new country. There is music that surges with strife and struggle, perhaps representing the creation of new lives beyond the Mississippi or perhaps a dark shadow signaling the abomination of slavery.
There is bellicose music that could be seen as a pointer to a popular war, perhaps the War of Independence, or an unpopular one, such as Vietnam. There is music of agitation and danger, which puts me in mind of the natural forces that early Americans found difficult to endure: the desolate cold, the angry heat, the cruel natural disasters.
The music ends quietly hopeful, with arms open wide, ready for whatever the future may bring. It was a powerful and delightful performance with Giancarlo Guerrero, artistic director and principal conductor of the Grant Park Symphony and Chorus, ensuring that the music had both muscle and grace. The orchestra gave each section its own unique touch and gathered the whole together neatly.
This was followed by music taken from Leonard Bernstein’s most treasured creation: the Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story.” This music remains as fresh and pleasing as it must have seemed when the musical premiered almost 70 years ago. Here Guerrero emphasized the Latin dance rhythms and the cool jazz. He let the anthems swell and the tension rise. The music moved from dance to dance without pause so that the swing of the Prologue turned seamlessly into the prayer of “Somewhere.” There was a good rocking sense in the Scherzo, while the Mambo benefited from Guerrero convincing the audience to participate with shouts when he signaled for them. Whether it was the understated rendition of “Maria” or the menace of the Rumble, the music had flair and the ending had shimmers of hope that peeked out through the tears.
The concert concluded with Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1, which Guerrero — who spoke engagingly before each piece — described as the “first great American Symphony.”
Barber was a prodigy and one of the first students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He was 14 when he began his studies there, but he had already been composing for several years and had already completed an operetta. After Curtis, Barber won the Prix de Rome, which provided two years of support in Italy. There, he completed this symphony, also known as “Symphony in One Movement,” modeled in part after Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7, which was a single movement. Yet Barber's work still has section markings, four of them, suggesting that Barber did not entirely abandon the standard symphonic structure. He, in fact, described it as “a synthetic treatment of the four-movement classical symphony."
The work has three main themes, all introduced in the first movement. Guerrero ensured that each one had individual character and presence. The music of the opening section featured big strokes, commanding gestures, and melodies that roared and rumbled. The Scherzo section was pert and rapidly paced, and Guerrero ensured that his musicians played with clarity. The Andante tranquillo developed the third theme and was moody with strong support from the orchestra’s lower voices. The concluding Con Moto (which is a passacaglia) draws together all the symphony's themes, and the orchestra rendered it with power and solemnity.
This marks the 92nd year of the Grant Park Music Festival, which has always offered these concerts free to the public, while for premium seating, you need to make a donation to the festival. There are free seats in the Seating Bowl as well as the Great Lawn for all Millennium Park concerts. (A few concerts are held in the Harris Theater.)
Coming up this weekend is a program featuring Copland's Symphony No. 3, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 (with Stewart Goodyear as soloist) and Reena Esmail's "Black Iris." Performances are Friday, June 19, at 6:30 p.m. and Saturday, June 20, at 7:30 p.m.
The festival continues through August 15, concluding with two performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on August 14 and 15. For more information, visit GrantParkMusicFestival.com.
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