The Grant Park Music Festival has unveiled its 2026 season, running from 10 June to 15 August, reaffirming its place as one of the United States’ most visible large-scale classical-music festivals. Spanning ten weeks of free concerts at Millennium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion and the Harris Theater, the festival continues to combine central symphonic repertoire with a strong emphasis on American music, community access, and contemporary voices.
Now in his second season as artistic director and principal conductor, Giancarlo Guerrero leads a programme that explicitly reflects the United States’ 250th anniversary, placing American composers—past and present—at the centre of the season. The focus is evident from the opening concert, which pairs Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story with works by Joan Tower and Samuel Barber, and continues through to the closing performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, framed by recent American works by Julia Wolfe and Michael Daugherty.
Across the season, the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus explore a broad stylistic range. Canonical European repertoire—Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Sibelius’s Second, Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, and Mozart’s Requiem—sits alongside landmark American scores, including Copland’s Symphony No. 3, Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3, William Grant Still’s Festive Overture, and George Gershwin’s An American in Paris. The programming consistently places these works in dialogue, underlining transatlantic connections rather than treating American music as a separate category.
The 2026 season also highlights contemporary and living composers, with works by Jessie Montgomery, Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, James MacMillan, Christopher Theofanidis, John Adams, Philip Glass, and John Corigliano. Several Chicago and Illinois premieres are included, alongside two world premieres commissioned by the festival: new works by Clarice Assad and Jasmine Barnes, written for the festival’s 2026 fellowship programmes. These commissions continue the festival’s long-standing commitment to nurturing emerging performers and composers within a high-profile public platform.
Guest conductors and soloists feature prominently. Pianists Stewart Goodyear, Olga Kern, Michelle Cann, and Garrick Ohlsson appear in concertos by Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Ravel, and Chopin, while violinists Anne Akiko Meyers, Yevgeny Kutik, and Will Hagen take on concertos by Glass, Schwantner, and Barber. Former principal conductor Leonard Slatkin returns to lead Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, and conductor laureate Carlos Kalmar appears in programmes ranging from Sibelius to Stravinsky and Elgar.
Alongside its core symphonic offerings, the festival maintains its tradition of thematic and crossover events, including the annual Independence Day Salute, the aerial-acrobatics production Cirque: A Space Odyssey, and An Evening with Ben Folds, reflecting the festival’s broad conception of public engagement. Vocal and choral music also remain central, with performances of Fauré’s Requiem and large-scale choral symphonies anchoring the mid- and late-summer programmes.
While the Grant Park Music Festival does not position itself alongside Europe’s destination festivals, its scale, artistic ambition, and free-admission model give it a distinctive international profile. The 2026 season, with its sustained focus on American music set within a global repertoire, underscores the festival’s role as a major cultural fixture in the U.S. summer calendar—and as a significant point of reference for orchestral life beyond the concert hall.
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