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As conductor of the
Nashville Symphony since 2009,
Giancarlo Guerrero has championed a broad range of accessible contemporary music. He has a long record of appearances and recordings in the U.S., Latin America, and beyond.
Guerrero was born in Managua, Nicaragua, on March 14, 1969, but was raised mostly in Costa Rica. He played with the Costa Rica Youth Symphony, and by his teens he was a percussionist in the National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica. His introduction to American music-making came at Baylor University, where he earned a bachelor's degree as a percussionist, but also studied conducting.
Guerrero went on for a master's degree in conducting at Northwestern University, working there with
Victor Yampolsky. He began his professional career in Latin America as music director of the Tachira Symphony Orchestra in Venezuela. In 1999, he became associate conductor of the
Minnesota Orchestra. During his first season, he conducted the world premiere of
John Corigliano's Phantasmagoria on themes from the Ghosts of Versailles. He remained with the
Minnesota Orchestra until 2004. He was also named music director of the Eugene Symphony Orchestra in Oregon in 2002, and two years later he won the Helen M. Thompson Award from the American Symphony Orchestra League, marking him as a rising young conductor.
Guerrero continued to appear in Latin America, conducting
Yo-Yo Ma and the Puerto Rico Symphony at the 2005 Casals Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the Buenos Aires Philharmonic at the Teatro Colón that same year. He has made guest appearances with major American symphony orchestras including those of
Boston,
Detroit, and
Dallas, and with such foreign groups as the
Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the
Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon.
Guerrero has also conducted opera at, among other places, the Adelaide Festival in Australia.
His repertory ranges forward from
Mozart to contemporary works. Since becoming music director of the
Nashville Symphony in 2009, he has focused on the latter, often inclining toward works of broad public appeal. He has championed the works of diverse composers including
John Adams,
Jennifer Higdon,
Terry Riley, and
Osvaldo Golijov. He immediately endeared himself to his Music City hosts by releasing an album featuring the
Metropolis Symphony of Michael Daugherty that won three Grammy awards. The album appeared on the Naxos label, and
Guerrero's association with that label has continued with one or two new releases each year in the 2010s. He and the
Nashville Symphony released an album featuring
music by composer Jonathan Leshnoff in 2019.