This June, Ludovic Morlot returns to Chicago to conduct five concerts at the Grant Park Music Festival. Morlot made his debut at the festival to great acclaim last year, with the Chicago Classical Review describing “a gripping, deeply expressive” concert.

On 26 June, Morlot will lead the Grant Park Orchestra in Haydn’s buoyant “London” Symphony alongside the suite from Richard Strauss’s comic opera Der Rosenkavalier and a world-premiere composition by the eclectic Brazilian-American composer Clarice Assad, Water Nymphs.

On 28 and 29 June, he conducts Stravinsky’s high-octane ballet score Petrushka, with dazzling instrumental effects, and the acclaimed Grant Park Chorus joins the orchestra for two marvelous choral rarities by Brahms and Kodály. Brahms’ Song of Destiny (Schicksalslied) sets lines by Friedrich Hölderlin in which the poet describes the difference between our lives in heaven and on earth: in heaven’s light-filled heights there is a sense of blissful calm, whereas here on earth we wander around restlessly, while plunging into uncertainty. Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus commemorated the 50^th anniversary of the city of Budapest by conjuring an ancient Hungary and uniting it with contemporary folksong.

Morlot’s final concerts on 3 and 5 July see him lead the orchestra in the soaring melodies of Tchaikovsky’s haunting “Pathétique” Symphony and the “mesmerizing, meditative” (Bachtrack) Color Shape Transmission by Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón, which Morlot premiered with the Seattle Symphony in 2022. Internationally-acclaimed violin virtuoso Anne Akiko Meyers joins the Grant Park Orchestra for the Latin dance-inspired Fandango by Mexican composer Arturo Márquez.

Offering a ten-week season of concerts, artistic development initiatives, radio broadcasts and community engagement and outreach programs, the Grant Park Music Festival will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2024 as well as its 20th season at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park.