The Great Populist Orchestra

Conductor Keith Lockhart discusses the perception of the Boston Pops as an orchestra for people who don’t like orchestras.

By: Daniel Shearer
   With more than 100 recordings and millions of television viewers annually on the PBS show Evening at Pops, The Boston Pops is easily the most visible orchestra in the United States. Since accepting the baton from conductor and composer John Williams in 1995, Keith Lockhart has led the group in more than 500 concerts and 15 U.S. tours.
   At 35, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., native became the ensemble’s 20th conductor after serving as director of orchestral activities at Carnegie Mellon University and conductor of the Pittsburgh Civic Orchestra. Mr. Lockhart also spent time as associate conductor for the Cincinnati Symphony and Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.
   At home, the Boston Pops performs in Symphony Hall, a facility designed for café-style seating around tables, a practice the group has maintained since its first summer program in 1885. The group is comprised of members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and has numerous engagements in New England throughout the year, along with a consistently sold-out Holiday Pops series.
   During the summer months and Christmas season, Mr. Lockhart also conducts the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, roughly 90 free-lance musicians brought together by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for large-venue and arena performances. The group will be at Sovereign Bank Arena in Trenton Dec. 16 for a holiday concert with gospel vocalist Renese King and the Cape Cod-based choir Gloriae Dei Cantores.
   The concert will include excerpts from the Menotti opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, the Holiday Pops favorite "Frosty All the Way," a musical version of the Dr. Seuss classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a Christmas for Children sing-along and numerous other arrangements.
   TimeOFF caught up with Mr. Lockhart for an early-morning phone interview shortly after the beginning of his holiday tour.
TimeOFF Where are you at the moment?
Keith Lockhart Lemme see, I’ll look out the window. Looks like State College, Pa., Penn State. Here last night, Chicago the day before that, and we’re on to Albany today.
TO Busy schedule.
KL We started in Phoenix a week and two days ago. We’ll be in New Jersey on the 16th for shows in Trenton and Newark. Actually, we’re in Boston at that time playing the regular concerts in Symphony Hall. We have a total of 53 of these concerts (chuckles). The spreaders of holiday cheer. Thirty-three of them are back in the hall, so we’ll go back there and be mostly there starting at the end of this week. Then we fly down to New Jersey, play both of them and fly back.
TO Two concerts in one day seems pretty hectic.
KL There are some days when there are three concerts, so we consider ourselves lucky (laughs). But it’s great. They’re wonderful concerts and there’s a demand for them, and we’re happy to oblige as much as we can, but it does make people yearn a bit for Dec. 31.
TO This is the first concert the Pops will be giving at the Sovereign Bank Arena, a venue where they have hockey games and rock concerts. When you perform at arenas, do you bring support equipment?
KL Any space that big has to be amplified. There’s no way around it. An orchestra without amplification would barely make it to the back wall in a place that big. If rock concerts have to be amplified in places like that, then orchestras certainly do. We bring all of our own sound equipment, actually, because we have the best control that way over what we’re getting and our own sound engineer. This holiday tour, pretty much since its inception, coincidentally, with my start (as Boston Pops conductor), so much of it has been designed as an arena, big-venue sort of tour that, frighteningly enough, we’ve grown accustomed to playing large venues like this. We feel we’ve worked a lot of the kinks out and that we can give people a show that sounds really wonderful even in the most unlikely of spots.
TO Do you mike sections?
KL Some of it is section by section, in area-mike sort of ways, and some of it is very specific. There’s a mike, for instance, on every cello stand. There’s a lot of inputs.
TO That’s a lot of feedback to balance.
KL Genius is an overused term, but if I had to use it for anybody in the organization I’d use it for our sound engineer, Steve Colby. He’s almost as responsible as any of us are for the way the organization ends up sounding. We do this night after night in completely different places without a rehearsal.
TO He’ll be balancing three dozen, four dozen mikes?
KL Yeah, he has something like 40 inputs on the orchestra.
TO Will you have amplifiers on either side of the orchestra?
KL There are speaker systems that are deployed throughout the hall to give more reinforcement as you go toward the back. There are speakers directly above the orchestra, but there are also speakers out closer to where the audience is.
TO That’s quite sophisticated and not unlike what I hear they’re putting in major symphony halls and opera houses.
KL An orchestra hall in Minnesota has amplification. They’ve started to use subtle reinforcement in a number of concert halls that were supposed to be built as concert halls but weren’t built very well and don’t have good, natural acoustical properties, so certainly there’s no shame to be using it when you’re talking about a 10,000-seat arena. If you do it well the audience doesn’t really notice that it’s there. They just notice that they can hear well.
   We’ve learned to play as if we are playing in Carnegie Hall. You can’t play trying to fill a place that big. You have to play within the limits of your instrument, and we try to balance it on the stage. Steve tries to give a representation of what we’re playing as if you were sitting on the stage with us.
TO It seems like the Boston Pops is the most visible orchestral ensemble in the U.S., possibly the world. What do you think has been key to its success, especially since there are pops groups in many cities, the Cincinnati Pops, for example. Is Doc Severinsen still conducting that group?
KL Yes, he is actually. Next year he’ll be 75.
TO The Philly Pops has Peter Nero. There are other pops orchestras, but when people think pops, they think Boston. Why is that?
KL Part of it is because it’s kind of the progenitor of all those other orchestras. It really is the granddaddy organization. This is our 117th season. A lot of that longevity has been due to getting the formula right, which is something that Arthur Fiedler deserves the credit for. The idea that this orchestra has been perceived by many different strata in the United States as being the orchestra for people who aren’t sure they like orchestras, the great populist orchestra, the great outreach orchestra, call it what you will. An orchestra that is good at presenting great music to people who don’t think they’re part of this small group of classical music fans.
   I think part of our success over the years has been that we’ve never forgotten that the orchestra is the star of the show. We’ve tried very hard in these tours and in our concerts in Symphony Hall to not become a backup band to a marquee name. We try to develop a fan base for the Boston Pops, not a fan base for whomever we’re accompanying. That, I think, does differentiate us from a lot of pop series around the country and is one of the things that has meant our name tends to stick in people’s minds.
TO An orchestra for people who don’t like orchestras. Does that perception generate a backlash from haughty classical music types?
KL It’s no secret that the classical music industry smacks of a certain unfortunate degree of elitism, that there are people who don’t seem to be as egalitarian about this music as I have always thought we should be. There are people who turn up their nose at the concept of an orchestra that a broad population base likes, but they aren’t the people we’re here for.
TO Before preparing for our interview, I’d never really thought of a Boston Pops concert in terms of a three-part program, light-classical, a middle section with a soloist and then a conclusion with show tunes. Is that something you find difficult to maintain with the a sense of originality for each season?
KL Actually, that structure gives a lot of flexibility. It’s nowhere near that simplified. We vary the mix all the time, but it does allow us to go to three different places in the concert fairly smoothly. There are concerts that have classical material on the last third of the program. There are concerts that have a concerto in the second part. That was really Fiedler’s idea. I wish I could take credit for it, but that’s basically the model we use at home in Boston. It’s not the model we use on the road. These concerts, for instance, are two-part concerts.
TO Do you maintain the café-style concert while you’re touring or is that something that stays at Symphony Hall?
KL Depends on the venue. That’s really up to the presenter. Some of these presenters on the tour have been having refreshments and tables down on the ground floor of the arena, for instance. Most halls aren’t set up to accommodate that, but arenas can do that. I think the majority on this tour have been café-style on the main floor and then normal seating further up.
TO Do you have a Grinch this year?
KL We have a major-league Grinch. His name is Will LeBow. He’s an actor with the American Repertory Theatre Company in Cambridge. He’s just absolutely magical on stage. He’s one of those great narrators with the kind of vocal inflection and impact that keeps people hanging on his every word. We’ll be bringing him along.
TO Will he sing the Grinch part?
KL The sung Grinch part is taken by the chorus.
TO Call me crazy, but "You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch," is the only song that comes to mind.
KL There’s actually a wonderful underscore to that entire animation, but as is the case of most good underscoring, you don’t really remember it because it just enhanced what you saw. But there is one other big Christmas tune in it, ‘Welcome Christmas,’ the song that the Whos sing down in Whoville that makes the Grinch have a change of heart. The reaction to this version we’re doing has been amazing. It’s such a baby boomer Christmas classic that people really do seem to enjoy it.
TO I see you’ll also be doing something called "A Christmas Scherzo." What is that?
KL It’s brand new. It’s just been premiered this year on this tour. We haven’t even played it in Boston yet. It’s another arrangement by Don Sebesky. He’s been an arranger for so many things, Gil Evans and things like that, to Broadway, the Sondheim Carnegie Hall tributes. Obvisouly he has his fingers in a lot of different pots in terms of musical influence. We asked him to do a first-half instrumental piece, which for us means somewhat serious, somewhat sacred in the case of a Christmas concert, that was based on a number of Christmas songs that were in 6/8 kind of time. He put them together in a sort of upbeat, scherzo-esque sort of manner and that was the best title we could come up with.
TO What do you look for in a Boston Pops arrangement?
KL A couple of things. If there’s anything that makes us unique outside of the basic versatility of the orchestra, it’s our arrangements, which is why they’re proprietary to us. We hang on to them and nobody else plays them. To be able to move from classical to arrangements worthy of a great virtuosic orchestra is something that makes us unique. We look for arrangements that are true to the original, that are not heavily co-opted so they don’t sound like Mantovani — I guess he’s out of business now so I can say that — not ones that have been co-opted into a squishy symphonic vernacular. On the other hand, arrangements done by people who not only know the original of, say, a Beatles tune or a Celtic folk tune, but people who also know orchestras. We want these arrangements to show off the kind of horses we have in our stable.
The Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, with Keith Lockhart conducting, will perform at the Sovereign Bank Arena, 550 S. Broad St., Trenton, Dec. 16, 1 p.m. Tickets cost $35-$75. For information, call (609) 520-8383. Tickets on the Web: www.ticketmaster.com; and at NJ-PAC, 1 Center St., Newark, Dec. 16, 7:30 p.m.; (609) 520-8383. On the Web: www.njpac.org