The Grant Park Music Festival ran from June 10 to August 15, Wednesday and Friday evenings at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, free. It is a tradition more than ninety years old and one of the only free outdoor classical series in the United States. The season opened with an orchestral presentation of Bernstein’s West Side Story and was programmed around America 250, with American composers, a Broadway tribute and the annual Independence Day Salute. Ben Folds made his festival debut on July 29.

The Crossover Booking

Folds fronting the Grant Park Orchestra is the kind of booking that either works beautifully or exposes everyone involved, and the reason it tends to work is that Folds is a genuine pianist with a real interest in orchestration rather than a pop singer renting strings. He has spent years working with orchestras and understands that the ensemble is not a backing track.

The wider point is that a free municipal orchestra has considerably more licence to do this than a subscription series does. Nobody bought a season ticket expecting Brahms and got Ben Folds. The audience on that lawn is self-selecting, weather-dependent and did not pay, which is precisely the condition under which an orchestra can take a risk.

America 250, Programmed by a City Orchestra

The season’s framing deserves more attention than it received. A festival choosing to organise its ninety-somethingth season around the country’s 250th anniversary has to decide what to say about the country, and it said it through American composers, Broadway and an Independence Day Salute.

That is a broad and fairly generous answer — the American canon as a musical theatre and concert-hall tradition, inclusive by repertoire rather than argumentative by theme. A more provocative programme was available in 2026 and the festival did not reach for it. Whether that is diplomacy or evasion depends on what one thinks a free city orchestra is for.

Worth setting beside the other patriotic programming of the summer. The 4th on 53rd parade in Hyde Park did the Fourth as a neighbourhood event with marching bands. El Grito in September livestreamed its civic ceremony so that people afraid to attend in person could still take part. Three very different accounts of what a national celebration sounds like in this city in 2026.

The Best-Kept Secret Problem

Ninety years of a free professional orchestra and chorus, in a Gehry bandshell, twice a week all summer, and it remains essentially unknown outside the metropolitan area. the season and the season cover it properly. The national arts press does not.

The full season is documented. Two nights a week, no ticket, ninety years running, and a lawn that fills up anyway.

Cover image: Via wfmt.com