Giancarlo Guerrero, Grant Park Orchestra shine in the rain

While outdoor music festivals are designed to take advantage of the warm temperatures and bright sunshine of summer, they also inevitably run afoul of less friendly weather at times, and the latter was certainly the case Wednesday evening at the Grant Park Music Festival.

Inclement weather earlier in the afternoon and a pessimistic weather forecast meant virtually no one spread blankets on the vast grassy expanse at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, and only several hundred people clustered in the fixed seats near the stage.

Rain started at the end of the first work, forcing attendees to quickly move to more sheltered seats under an overhang at the front of the stage, but after the second selection, scores left, and more continued to trickle out as the rain continued.

The unpleasant conditions put an unfortunate damper on what was supposed to be a celebratory concert marking the beginning of Giancarlo Guerrero’s tenure as artistic director of the annual classical music festival, which moved to Millennium Park in 2004.

But the conductor seemed undeterred. “You really are the die-hards,” he said approvingly to the audience during remarks from the podium in which he offered short, enthusiastic comments on each of the evening’s three selections.

Festival officials announced in October the appointment of Guerrero, 56, as the successor to Carlos Kalmar, who stepped down at the end of Grant Park’s 2024 season after 25 seasons and assumed the title of conductor laureate.

Guerrero, a Venezuelan native who grew up in Costa Rica, ended his 16-year tenure in May as music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. He has previous ties to the Chicago area, having earned his master’s degree in 1992 from Northwestern University in Evanston.

The incessant rain and cool conditions made it hard to focus on the music, and that in turn did not allow for a full and fair assessment of Guerrero. That will have to come another time. He is here for four of the festival’s 10 weeks this summer, making his final appearances Aug. 15 and 16.

That said, a few things could be gleaned from his debut at music director. He has pledged to continue the festival’s tradition of offering a healthy dose of contemporary music and unusual or under-recognized works, and examples of both were on Wednesday’s program.

The concert opened with “An American Port of Call” (1985), a boisterous, sprawling 10-minute overture that is the best-known work by 84-year-old Virginia composer Adolphus Hailstork. It successfully evokes what the composer has described as a “strident (and occasionally tender and even mysterious) energy of a busy American port city.”

The work is filled with big, full-voiced chords; expansive, variegated percussion; and bursts of light dissonances, not to mention echoes of Leonard Bernstein and especially George Gershwin — the rowdy sound effects and hurly-burly of “An American in Paris” and the alluring clarinet in “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Anchoring the middle of the program was Felix Mendelssohn’s oft-played Violin Concerto in E minor, featuring the orchestra’s concertmaster, Jeremy Black, an Evanston native who also serves as principal second violinist of the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Black is a fine violinist who solidly handled all the technical demands of this work, but his playing came across as over-practiced with little sense of the immediacy this concerto demands, and the lagging tempos, especially in the opening Allegro movement, didn’t help matters.

The high point of the evening was the closing work by Bernstein. Instead of his oft-played Symphonic Dances or one of Bernstein’s symphonies, Guerrero, to his credit, chose a less frequently heard piece — the Symphonic Suite from the composer’s 1954 film score, “On the Waterfront.”

Although it could be argued the 19-minute concert work does not have enough oomph for a program closer, it nonetheless contains some of the composer’s most complex and affecting music.

Guerrero and the first-rate Grant Park Orchestra compellingly negotiated the work’s rapidly shifting mood and feel, bringing apt punch to the propulsive, rhythmically charged motifs for which Bernstein is well known and emotional nuance to the quiet, vulnerable moments with just a handful of instruments.

The orchestra is composed of musicians on summer break from top orchestras and schools across the country, and there were many notable individual performances here, including affecting solos by acting principal French hornist Patrick Walle and alto saxophonist Jeremy Ruthrauff.

Clocking in at less 70 minutes without intermission, this program on just about any other evening would have come off as a bit lightweight even for a weekday, but short was sweet on this soggy evening as the remaining audience members made a quick exit after its conclusion.