Review: Grant Park Music Festival opens with Latin dances and a multitasking conductor

Chicago Tribune

12-06-2025

Depending where you are, introducing oneself as American in Spanish — soy Americano — might set you up for some playful ribbing. To many, the descriptor is understood to refer to the Americas broadly, not the United States.
On Wednesday, a very Americano opening night of the Grant Park Music Festival, led by guest conductor Andrew Litton, took that wide angle. Gabriela Lena Frank's 'Three Latin American Dances' references indigenous American and European sources alike, mixing — like so much Latin American music — in a fluid, unbroken tapestry. The Spanish dances in Manuel de Falla's 'The Three-Cornered Hat,' later in the program, hit home those Old World influences. Even 'Rhapsody in Blue,' the U.S.-of-American piece at the concert's heart, briefly shuffles atop Latin rhythms.
Though studiously apolitical, the concert's Pan-American outlook took on added resonance this week amid demonstrations in Chicago and across the country over immigration raids targeting migrants from Latin America. Just a few short months ago, festival music director Giancarlo Guerrero — born in Nicaragua, raised in Costa Rica — placed 30-second ad spots for the festival on Spanish-language radio, a savvy marketing move for a city that is more than a fifth Spanish-speaking. But the festival has opened to a stark new political reality.
Guerrero will arrive at the festival starting next week. In the meantime, Litton devised a sufficiently show-stopping opener by conducting and playing 'Rhapsody in Blue.' Doing double duty is doubtlessly a feat, but it's an entirely possible one, Litton told the audience: the solo piano part and orchestral backing more or less trade off throughout.
There are about a million ways to tackle Gershwin's perennial, and local audiences have heard a few already in recent summers. On Wednesday, Litton and the Grant Parkers went for contrast: The orchestra's raucous, jazzy heft met the cool steel of Litton's primmer and ever-so-classical interpretation.
Litton's necessary focus on the solo part often freed the Grant Park musicians — especially solo voices like clarinetist Trevor O'Riordan and trombonist Jeremy Moeller — to take inspiring interpretive risks. Likewise, Litton seemed more in his element than in the rest of the program. Lines ebbed and flowed with ease, and he briefly superimposed some swing on his cadenza halfway through the piece.
However, Litton was less decisive when he recouped his baton. He appeared notably more reliant on the score to 'Dances,' written in 2004, than he did the Gershwin and de Falla's; unsurprisingly, a staid, mostly anonymous account followed. Grant Park's open-air setting is always a daunting container for atmospheric, hazily scored music like the opening of the second-movement 'Highland Harawi.' Here, though, it came off as detached rather than distant, draining the screeching-violin cataclysm a few minutes later of its drama. The lackadaisical tempo of the 'Mestizo Waltz' capper never reached liftoff, either. Overall, this was the rare Grant Park evening where the 21st century work got the short end of the stick.
'The Three-Cornered Hat' fared better. It still had its flat moments — the exposition felt a bit ushered along, as did the beginning of 'The Neighbors Dance' — but in this familiar repertoire, the ensemble did more to rise to the occasion. Cheeky pinprick staccatos from oboist Alex Liedtke and bassoonist Eric Hall enlivened the 'Dance of the Miller's Wife.' Later, the 'Jota' finale thrived in the delightful juxtaposition of grandiosity and mischief, represented by pulsing low voices and tiptoeing woodwinds.
It tends to take a program or two for the Grant Parkers to readjust to playing together in the Pavilion. Wednesday was no exception, with several scattered moments. But this ever-flexible orchestra course-corrects quickly: It only took a bar or so for violins to brush themselves off after some disagreement at the top of Frank's 'Dances,' and again in harried moments in 'The Three-Cornered Hat.' But its sound was always gleaming and well-rounded, the instrumental balance impeccable all evening.
From the curtain-raising 'Star-Spangled Banner' to the de Falla's hair-raising Jota, this was a banner night for the Grant Park brass in particular. Trombones converged cleanly and mightily for their soli in 'Rhapsody in Blue'; so did trumpets at the flamenco-y start of the 'Mestizo Waltz.'
In an uncertain, ugly summer, what a gift it is to have Grant Park.
The Grant Park Music Festival continues this Friday at 6:30 p.m. with Holst's 'The Planets,' conducted by festival chorus director Christopher Bell in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St.; free, www.grantparkmusicfestival.com