Giancarlo Guerrero

Giancarlo Guerrero is a six-time Grammy Award-winning conductor and music director of the Nashville Symphony. Guerrero has been praised in the Seattle Times for his “charismatic conducting and attention to detail,” in the Boston Globe for “viscerally powerful performances,” and by BachTrack for performances that are “at once vigorous, passionate, and nuanced.”

Through commissions, recordings, and world premieres, Guerrero has championed the works of prominent American composers. He has led the Nashville Symphony in 11 world premieres and 15 recordings of American music, including works by Michael Daugherty, Terry Riley, and Jonathan Leshnoff. Most recently, he conducted the Grammy-nominated recording of “John Adams: My Father Knew Charles Ives & Harmonielehre.”

As part of his commitment to fostering contemporary composers, Guerrero, together with composer Aaron Jay Kernis, guided the creation of the Nashville Symphony’s biannual Composer Lab & Workshop for young and emerging composers.

In the 2023-24 season, Guerrero returned to conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in its joint concert with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. He also returned to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Brussels Philharmonic, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Bilbao, and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

Guerrero has also appeared in recent seasons with prominent North American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and the orchestras of Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Montréal, Philadelphia, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, and Houston. Internationally, he has worked with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Deutsches Radio Philharmonie, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, as well as the Sydney and Queensland symphony orchestras in Australia. Guerrero was honored as the keynote speaker at the 2019 League of American Orchestras conference.

Guerrero recently completed a six-season tenure as music director of the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic. With that orchestra, he made three recordings, including the Billboard chart-topping “Bomsori: Violin on Stage” on Deutsche Grammophon, and albums of repertoire by Brahms, Poulenc, and Jongen.

Guerrero previously held posts as the principal guest conductor of both the Gulbenkian Symphony in Lisbon and The Cleveland Orchestra during its Miami residency, music director of the Eugene Symphony, and associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra.

Born in Nicaragua, Guerrero immigrated to Costa Rica during his childhood, where he joined the local youth symphony. He studied percussion and conducting at Baylor University in Texas and earned his master’s degree in conducting at Northwestern University. Given his beginnings in civic youth orchestras, Guerrero is particularly engaged with training orchestras and has worked with the Curtis Institute of Music, the Colburn School in Los Angeles, National Youth Orchestra (NYO2), and Yale Philharmonia, as well as the Nashville Symphony’s Accelerando program, which provides intensive music education to promising young students from diverse ethnic backgrounds.