The Grant Park Music Festival on Tuesday announced its summer schedule, running from June 10 to August 15.
The free, Millennium Park-based festival’s programming skews toward contemporary and American music, a commitment redoubled by new artistic director and principal conductor Giancarlo Guerrero. It ups that emphasis this summer, with programming tied to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“When you look at this season, I think it’s a celebration and observation of what has made America,” Guerrero says.
The festival commissions American composers Clarice Assad and Jasmine Barnes to write works for the festival’s string and vocal fellows (at offsite parks concerts, dates to be announced). The season closes with the local premiere of Julia Wolfe’s “Liberty Bell,” co-commissioned by the festival (Aug. 14-15).
While not premieres, two other works are no less ambitious undertakings. Written in 2017, Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Conquest Requiem” brings together a full chorus, orchestra and two vocal soloists for a 40-minute, multilingual epic (June 12-13). Later that month, the orchestra, guest conductor Kalena Bovell and Lookingglass Theatre Company actors team up for Peter Boyer’s “Ellis Island: The Dream of America,” a musical-theatrical piece written in 2002 (June 24).
While curating this season, Guerrero says he was interested not only in exploring American music, but how the founding of the United States affected global history and thought. For example, he conducts John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, a tribute to AIDS victims, alongside Mozart’s Requiem, which Mozart left unfinished the same month as the ratification of the Bill of Rights (Aug. 7-8). He also pairs Wolfe’s “Liberty Bell” with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, whose promise that “All men will be brothers” resonates with the American experiment.
To hit the point home, every Grant Park program this summer features either an American-born or -based composer. Guerrero consciously took an expansive view of the latter.
“There is, I would say, a big underlying discussion happening now about what it is to be American. I mean, I’m from Nicaragua and grew up in Costa Rica, but I have an American passport. So, why don’t they call me an American conductor?” Guerrero says. “Rachmaninoff had a U.S. passport, but we’ve never called Rachmaninoff an American composer. … I wanted to make the case for Rachmaninoff; I wanted to make the case for Stravinsky. I wanted to make the case for people that either came to America or made a huge part of their careers in America.”
Summer 2026 also marks chorus director Christopher Bell’s 25th season with the organization. In addition to his usual Independence Day concert (July 4), Bell leads a concert headlined by Fauré’s Requiem (July 17-18) as well as a program of “American Choral Classics” at Holy Name Cathedral and the South Shore Cultural Center (June 23 and July 2, respectively).
The excellence of the Grant Park chorus — which recently released a holiday album — is itself a tribute to Bell. Guerrero recalls meeting with the choir to rehearse Jennifer Higdon’s “The Singing Rooms” last year.
“I came with a list of things to work on in this two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal, and after 20 minutes, I remember (turning to) Chris. I mean, I was afraid to touch it; it was so incredible,” he says. “He wants nothing but what’s best for the music.”
Former Grant Park batons also return this season. Conductor laureate Carlos Kalmar leads two programs with soloists Olga Kern (in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, July 1 and 3) and Third Coast Percussion (playing Christopher Theofanidis’ “Drum Circles,” July 8). The following week, Leonard Slatkin conducts a program that includes his own orchestral fantasy, “Schubertiade” (July 10-11).
Other concerts of note: a solo appearance by cellist Oliver Herbert, the son of Chicago Symphony timpanist David Herbert (June 17); a Pride month program at Harris Theater, featuring pianist Sara Davis Buechner and conductor Edwin Outwater (June 26-27); the return of pianist Michelle Cann in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (July 15); a pops spectacle with aerialists from Troupe Vertigo (July 22); a one-night-only collaboration with singer-songwriter Ben Folds (July 29); new CSO hire and former Grant Park fellow Gabriela Lara in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s violin concerto (July 31-Aug. 1); and Anne Akiko Meyers in Philip Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 1, a work she recently recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Aug. 12).
For a complete season lineup, visit gpmf.org.
And a farewell
When the Grant Park Music Festival opens this summer, one person won’t be onstage, making his usual seasonal address: Paul Winberg, president and CEO of the festival since 2011. Winberg, 63, steps down this spring, as announced in October.
In an interview with the Tribune, Winberg said he’d waited to step down until concluding a $15 million endowment campaign, which ended last year, and securing new artistic leadership, as it did with Guerrero last season.
“I love what I do, but I felt like I had come to a place where I had been able to check off everything on my list of what I wanted to accomplish,” he says. “There’s an exciting generation of young people out there… full of energy and ideas and what they think classical music needs to look like.”
Winberg first caught the musical bug as a talented pianist and violinist growing up in the Twin Cities. At 17, he won a youth concerto competition hosted by the Minnesota Orchestra, soloing with the ensemble in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2. He enrolled at the University of Michigan as a piano major but left as a musical theater major.
“(College) allowed me a certain freedom to explore my curiosity, which is probably how I would describe the throughline of my entire working life — just following my bliss,” he says.
Winberg arrived in Chicago with a goal of working in the arts. But with the AIDS crisis beginning to bludgeon the city, Winberg redirected. He started working for a home health agency, which offered crucial support to the infected.
“At that time, people were throwing their roommates out of apartments, and hospitals didn’t want them,” he says.
There, Winberg first learned the ins and outs of nonprofit work — experience he leaned on after returning to the performing arts years later. After getting a master’s in public administration from the University of Illinois Chicago, he applied for an internship in the field — in fact, at the Grant Park Music Festival. He spent the summer of 1997 as a production and operations intern for the organization, then was hired back between 1999 and 2001 as the festival’s artistic administrator and orchestra manager. That opened the door to stints at the Elgin Symphony and Eugene Symphony in Oregon, the latter as executive director.
Through those experiences, Winberg worked closely with both Kalmar and Guerrero, the former and current Grant Park artistic directors. Guerrero’s first American appointment was with the Eugene Symphony, overlapping with Winberg from 2004 to 2009.
Guerrero credits Winberg as “a huge part of my growth as a conductor and as a musician.”
“One of the reasons why I took the (Grant Park) position is because of Paul,” he says. “You could see that he had created an incredible environment that nurtured that creative spark. As a music director, it made my job incredibly easy.”
Most crucially, Winberg oversaw the Grant Park Music Festival’s transition from being a program of the Park District to becoming an independent entity. In 2004, the Grant Park Music Festival’s move from Grant Park proper to Millennium Park became a sticking point in the organization’s agreement with the district, since Millennium Park is operated by the city and not the Park District. Foreseeing challenges ahead, the influential former Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events commissioner Lois Weisberg established the Grant Park Orchestral Association as a 501(c)3.
In the early years of his tenure, Winberg oversaw bringing the festival’s operations and payroll under the association’s umbrella, completing that transition in 2016. In exchange, the Park District agreed to pay $2.9 million over the next decade to help support personnel salaries.
Winberg says the festival’s partnerships with both the City of Chicago and Park District make it unique among summer classical music festivals. For example, the festival is hoping that ongoing conversations with the Park District will result in a renewal of that 10-year funding agreement when it lapses after this season.
Unlike the first agreement, that $2.9 million is now “about 30%” of the festival’s operating budget, rather than half. That change is in keeping with Winberg’s tenure-long goal to “reduce reliance on municipal support, because things can change so quickly at the city and Park District level.”
“I’ve maintained that if we’re going to continue to be a free festival, we’ll always need municipal support,” Winberg says. “But if it ever did go away, it would not damage our ability to produce the festival going forward.”
That shift has also allowed the festival to build its reputation as a haven for contemporary music. Winberg’s fundraising strategy has opened the door for the orchestra to commission in earnest — a marked change from when he arrived in 2011.
It has also attracted donors interested in supporting specific projects, like the festival’s string and vocal fellowship program, inaugurated during Winberg’s tenure. Designed for applicants from demographics historically underrepresented in classical music, the fellowship was originally a collaboration with the Chicago Sinfonietta but has become an independent program of the festival. According to a press release, 76 alumni have passed through the fellowship to date, with two — violinist Gabriela Lara and mezzo-soprano Imara Miles — soloing on 2026 programs.
“The whole audition process is done behind a screen, even the finals. So, it’s always kind of amazing to me that we end up with a group of people that we’re still trying to help support and elevate,” Winberg says.
As announced along with his departure in the fall, the search for Winberg’s successor has already begun. In the meantime, he says he’ll be on hand to offer guidance, including in a formal capacity as a consultant through the end of the year.
One person already knows he’ll be keeping Winberg on speed dial.
“I’m going to be reaching out to him and seeking his advice,” Guerrero says.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.