Giancarlo Guerrero leads San Francisco-based string players during Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl, Feb. 8, 2026, in Santa Clara, California. Photo from video courtesy of NFL.
In Monday’s (2/9) Chicago Tribune, Hannah Edgar writes, “Four minutes into Bad Bunny’s halftime show during the Super Bowl on Sunday, the camera panned over two rows of grinning string players. Leading them with graceful, sweeping beats and a sparkling hibiscus flower on his lapel? Giancarlo Guerrero, the chief conductor of Chicago’s own Grant Park Music Festival … [Guerrero’s] team received a call from Bad Bunny’s manager on Jan. 31 inviting him to be one of more than 700 participants in the halftime show…. Guerrero learned that the 31-year-old Bad Bunny (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) not only asked for a Hispanic conductor, but for Guerrero specifically…. Guerrero, 56, was born in Nicaragua but largely raised in Costa Rica…. He [is] a fixture on local podiums, not only in his post at the Grant Park Music Festival but in frequent guest appearances at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.” Guerrero is music director of Florida’s Sarasota Orchestra and was music director of the Nashville Symphony for 16 years. “When he had a chance to meet Bad Bunny one-on-one, Guerrero learned he was a classical music fan. ‘That’s why he didn’t want to just put some sort of fake string orchestra (onstage). He wanted a real string orchestra, with a real conductor,’ Guerrero says. Guerrero is on camera for roughly 30 seconds while leading a corps of San Francisco-based musicians in the opening of Bad Bunny’s ‘Monaco.’ ”
At the opening of the Super Bowl, Sphinx Organization artists Stephanie Matthews and Kayla Cabrera, other musicians, and vocalist Coco Jones performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black national anthem. Charlie Puth sang the U.S. National Anthem.
