Giancarlo Guerrero conducts Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3, a masterful synthesis of the composer’s expansive American musical style. Piano virtuoso Stewart Goodyear returns to the Festival for Prokofiev’s charming Piano Concerto No. 3, presented alongside Reena Esmail’s emotionally impactful Black Iris.

Copland Symphony No. 3

Millennium Park

Percussive bombast suggests an advancing army in Haydn’s Military Symphony No. 100 in this thrilling program conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. After Julia Perry’s energetic Short Piece, young cello virtuoso Oliver Herbert joins the Grant Park Orchestra for Shostakovich’s lively Cello Concerto No. 1.

Haydn Military Symphony

Giancarlo Guerrero leads the Grant Park Orchestra in Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, the composer’s poignant final symphony. Gabriela Lena Frank’s harrowing Conquest Requiem and Charles Ives’s eclectic Variations on America round out the program.

Brahms Symphony No. 4

Artistic Director and Principal Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero opens the 2026 Festival season in style with Leonard Bernstein’s jazzy, Latin-inspired Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. Joan Tower’s Made in America and Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1 in One Movement continue the celebration of American music in honor of the United States’ 250th.

Bernstein West Side Story

Kalena Bovell leads the Grant Park Orchestra in the wistful lyricism of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto with acclaimed violinist Will Hagen. Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst opens the concert with a bang, and actors from Lookingglass Theatre Company bring to life Peter Boyer’s innovative multimedia work Ellis Island: The Dream of America.

Barber Violin Concerto

Conductor Edwin Outwater takes the podium for Tchaikovsky’s dazzling Piano Concerto No. 1, featuring award-winning pianist Sara Davis Buechner. Jimmy López’s Loud, Lou Harrison’s Elegiac Symphony No. 2, and Amy Woodforde-Finden’s Kashmiri Song round out the eclectic program celebrating LGBTQ+ pride.

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Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1

Harris Theater for Music and Dance

Conductor Laureate Carlos Kalmar returns to the Festival with the technically brilliant pianist Olga Kern for Rachmaninov’s highly virtuosic Piano Concerto No. 3. The program also features Stravinsky’s mischievously charming ballet Game of Cards and Elgar’s sunny In the South.

Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 3

Conductor Laureate Carlos Kalmar returns for Sibelius’s majestic Symphony No. 2, an emblem of Finnish nationalism written at a time of cultural and linguistic suppression. Christopher Theofanidis’s Drum Circle makes its Chicago premiere, featuring the virtuosic musicians of Third Coast Percussion.

Sibelius Symphony No. 2

Former Grant Park Music Festival Principal Conductor Leonard Slatkin returns to conduct Tchaikovsky’s fatalistic Symphony No. 5. Violinist Yevgeny Kutik makes his Festival debut in the Chicago premiere of Joseph Schwantner’s Violin Concerto.

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5

Conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson makes her Festival debut with William Grant Still’s celebratory Festive Overture, followed by Ravel’s jazz-inflected Piano Concerto featuring star pianist Michelle Cann. Florence Price’s sweeping Symphony No. 3 concludes the program in its first Festival outing.

Ravel Piano Concerto

Ben Folds is an Emmy-nominated singer-songwriter who has created an enormous body of genre-bending music that includes pop albums with Ben Folds Five, multiple solo albums, a holiday album, and numerous collaborative records. He currently tours as a pop artist, while also performing for over two decades with some of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras.

Special Event: An Evening with Ben Folds

Making his Festival debut, Kedrick Armstrong conducts the Grant Park Orchestra in Gershwin’s jaunty An American In Paris. Experience the propulsive energy of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1 and Duke Ellington’s The Three Black Kings alongside Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s lyrical Violin Concerto with soloist Gabriela Lara, an alumna of the Festival’s String Fellowship program.

Gershwin An American in Paris

Gabriela Lara | Grant Park Music Festival

Garrick Ohlsson—one of only two Americans to have won the International Chopin Piano Competition—returns to the Festival to perform Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero, the program also journeys to Mexico and Italy with Juan Pablo Contreras’s lively Mariachitlán and Tchaikovsky’s tuneful Capriccio Italien.

Ohlsson Plays Chopin

Giancarlo Guerrero leads the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus in Mozart’s soul-stirring Requiem, left incomplete at the time of the composer’s premature death at 35. Written during the height of the AIDS crisis, John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 is another requiem of sorts, memorializing friends and colleagues lost to the disease.

Mozart Requiem

Giancarlo Guerrero conducts Dvořák’s New World Symphony, a Czech composer’s interpretation of the American folk songs and spirituals he had come to admire while living in the United States. Two works by prominent American minimalist composers open the program—John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1, featuring GRAMMY® Award-winning violinist Anne Akiko Meyers.

Grant Park Orchestra

Jun 24, 2026

Barber Violin Concerto

Jun 26, 2026

Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1

1 - 3 Jul, 2026

Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 3

Jul 8, 2026

Sibelius Symphony No. 2

10 - 11 Jul, 2026

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5

19 - 20 Jun, 2026

Copland Symphony No. 3

Jun 17, 2026

Haydn Military Symphony

Grant Park Orchestra