Sarasota Arts and Culture Events to Watch in 2025
From a new performing arts center to Mote SEA, here are the things to keep an eye on the first half of 2025 in Sarasota.
When he first came to conduct the Sarasota Orchestra a year ago, Giancarlo Guerrero had a relatively easy time focusing on the music while meeting with administrators and staff who were leading a search for a new music director.
Now that he is music director designate, preparing to fully start his new job in the fall, Guerrero knows his return to lead the “Heroic Spirit” Masterworks concert series will be a much busier experience.
“In every single visit, every minute on the ground is actually taken,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “We are getting to know the entire staff. They’re learning my own rhythms, things I like to do, what time I get up in the morning, what time is too early to talk or meet, simple logistical stuff like that.”
Guerrero is stepping down this spring as music director of the Nashville Symphony, which he has led since 2008, and where he will become music director laureate and conduct at least four weeks in the coming season.
Having served many years as a music director, “I know the responsibility goes beyond conducting from the podium,” he said. “But it’s an exciting time. I already know the things I need to know. I have someone on the staff who is my point person and we’re talking about marketing, planning and fundraising.”
He’s also working on programs for the 2025-26 season, which he is shaping after initial work by conductors Peter Oundjian and David Alan Miller, who have worked as consultants and advisors to Sarasota Orchestra since the music director search began.
“Already some things that were planned not only by the advisory committee but by Peter and David, some things that I thought were great ideas, are coming together. But this planning goes beyond next season. What happens next season continues until we get to that wonderful moment when we move into the new music center.”
The long-planned music center has been moving forward during the director search. The orchestra has hired design architects and landscape architects and leaders expect some initial conceptual designs in the first part of the new year.
Creating the ‘Heroic Spirit’
The Masterworks program that Guerrero will lead will be his third with Sarasota Orchestra since his debut in January 2024 with a concert that included Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and Kevin Puts’ “Marimba Concerto.” He returned last fall in his first concert since being named music director designate.
The “Heroic Spirit” theme stems from Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich, considered the Russian composer’s most famous piece, and one in which he appears to mock the Soviet government whose support he needed for survival. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his death in 1975.
The composer was always associated with turbulent times, Guerrero said. The symphony was written in 1937, “a time of great terror in the Soviet Union. Artists and other people could easily be sent to a gulag or killed for writing the wrong piece of music or poetry or novel,” Guerrero said.
Shostakovich had been considered something of a golden child of Soviet composition. “He was seen as the most important, leading voice, especially for a composer in his late 20s or early 30s.”
Most of that was due to his opera “Lady Macbeth,” which “became the hottest ticket all over the Soviet Union” at least until Soviet leader Joseph Stalin came to see a performance, Guerrero said.
“The next morning in the communist newspaper Pravda, there was an unsigned article with the headline ‘Muddle not Music’ completely attacking the opera as decadent, against all the ideals of the Soviet regime. Shostakovich went from being the most important living composer of his day to being Public Enemy No. 1 and he feared for his life.”
Guerrero said the composer wrote the fifth symphony “to get back in the good graces of the government and with Stalin, and I guess it worked. Everybody called it the greatest Russian, Soviet symphonic work.”
But Guerrero said the piece includes “hidden messages critical of the government, and the longer we perform it the more things we recognize. There are inner melodies that somehow mock patriotic songs that are changed into something more sarcastic.”
Concert features a modern Mexican masterpiece
The concert also feature Fandango for Violin and Orchestra by Arturo Marquez, whom Guerrero described as “the dean of Mexican composers. He’s turning 75 years old, but he has been mostly known in Latin America until now. I knew about him from Costa Rica and Venezuela, but in the last 10 years he has become a very well-known composer.”
The piece reunites the conductor with violin soloist Anne Akiko Meyers, It is featured in a program that also includes a rising new composition, Arturo Marquez’s Fandango for Violin and Orchestra, which reunites Guerrero with violin soloist and Grammy Award winner Anne Akiko Meyers. Her recording of the piece with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel received two Latin Grammy Awards. The piece had its premiere with the LA Phil in 2021 at the Hollywood Bowl.
“I’ve done it five times with Anne Akiko. It’s probably the most successful new piece of music I’ve encountered. It’s not just how fast it has captivated audiences. It is beautiful, fantastic, virtuosic, all the accolades you can give a piece. Every single time I’ve done this piece, whether in Nashville or Utah, by the end of the first movement the audience is already on its feet. It is unbelievable. I have to turn around and tell the audience we’re not done yet. There are still two movements to go.”
He said the Fandango is a perfect ambassador for the idea of new music.
“Not all new music needs to be looked at with some sort of trepidation,” he said. “All music was new at some point. We have this new piece that is already becoming a war horse.”
In past seasons, Sarasota Orchestra performed his Danzon No. 2.
A Beethoven Overture
The program also features Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, which was meant to be the opening to Beethoven telling the story of the Roman General Coriolanus based on a German version by Joseph von Collins.
“It was so rich with drama and a natural for Beethoven to pick it up. But in the end that didn’t happen and the only thing we had left was the overture. It was written in 1807,” Guerrero said
As he prepares to take over the Sarasota Orchestra in the fall and reveal a season line-up in the coming months, Guerrero said he has no concerns about whatever musical challenges his selections may pose for the musicians.
“I can tell you the thing that first and foremost attracted me to the orchestra was the musicians, the very high level of the orchestra, the virtuosity. That magical moment when I conducted them for the first time, everything began to click. They gave me the idea that there’s nothing these players can’t tackle. They can basically play anything, any composer, any language, they can do it.”
‘Heroic Spirit’
Sarasota Orchestra led by Music Director Designate Giancarlo Guerrero, with violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. 7:30 p.m. Jan. 30, Neel Performing Arts Center, 5840 26th St., West, Bradenton. $45. 7:30 p.m. Jan. 31-Feb. 1, 2:30 p.m. Feb. 2, Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, 777 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. $39-$79. 941-953-3434; sarasotaorchestra.org
Follow Jay Handelman on Facebook, Instagram and BlueSky Contact him at jay.handelman@heraldtribune.com. And please support local journalism by subscribing to the Herald-Tribune.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.heraldtribune.com ’
