Wed. May 9 – Sat. June 16 

   “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck,” says Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, the week before he kicks off his 18th season at Symphony Hall in Boston.  “I realize that may be a little subjective.”
     The question was: Are you feeling all right?
     The ever-affable, 52-year-old maestro caught a nasty bug April 20th, the day he and the Pops played Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary.  “I’m feeling better than I was then,” he says from his Brookline home, “but I wouldn’t go all the way to ‘all right.’  It’s been two weeks. Mostly it’s a bad hacking cough that keeps me up at night. I’ll be fine once we get into the run of it.”
     Ah, the run. It’s a whirlwind 33-concert season that begins Friday with Broadway singer Bernadette Peters and ends June 16 with the final “Visions of America” presentation, the latter being the running theme of the season. Along the way: A visit (May 29 and 30) from Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers (Lockhart: “my most gee whiz moment”), the return of Pops Laureate conductor John Williams and his Film Nights (June 1 and 2)
 

    JSInk: As you’re fighting your way off the sick bed now, let me ask, in general, how’s your stamina at the podium? And your passion?
   Keith Lockhart: To be perfectly honest, it’s not as easy as it was almost two decades ago. There’s a lot of work in a very concentrated period of time. It’s like everything else when you reach middle age, I can also play two hours of tennis but I pay for it a lot more than I did twenty years ago. In terms of the passion, it’s a challenging world we live in from a live entertainment point of view right now. We have a great thing here and figuring out how to cast it and keep it viable and important is a continual challenge and at least an occasional, perhaps continual, frustration as well.  But the great thing about it is, the sands shift so much around us over this period of time – everything around us in the entertainment world –  it’s not boring. It’s not like I can do the same things I did ten years ago, because I’m constantly thinking about what else we can do.
     When does the hard work come?
     The hardest work is long before the audience sees it. The hardest work is programming, which is of course mostly done by this point and then making the pieces fit together. You have all these ideas about what you want to do and you have an artist who’s available and then falls through at the last minute and you’re scrambling and you get material from composers and arrangers and they’re not what you thought they were supposed to be or not what you thought you agreed to., so you’re debating with them and it all seems to happen with a giant ticking clock over your head. Once it starts, the season starts, there’s pretty much too much to do much about them.

   In terms of scheduling and collaboration, what’s your percentage of landing the artists you want to play with?
   We don’t get the door closed in our face very often, but it varies from year to year and it varies from discipline to discipline. Sometimes with our more contemporary offerings we’ve done over the years it’s very hard to tell a pop act that they  have to be available on [a certain night], so we have a lack of flexibility problem on our side of things. We have great relationships with Broadway singers and fortunately we have a large stable.
   And Bernadette returns for the first night this year.
    Simply put, she’s kind of the best. She’s so good at doing what she does. The concept of “Broadway star” isn’t quite the same as it used to be. There was Mary Martincq and John Raitt cqand those people, but now there’s so many TV and film actors who’ve moved over to Broadway. The story is about the bells and whistles of the show itself, rather than the show. But Bernadette remains the grand diva of American musical theatre. We worked with her a number of times over the last several years, but she’s never opened for us. And we thought: Who better to start with?
    Like last year, it’s a fairly conservative program – the George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Barbra Streisand cqtributes, a gospel night, the Williams film nights. You’re playing to your core audience with music in your wheelhouse.
   I think that’s a fair assessment. There’s lots of great stuff, but it’s not the kind of season where you look at it and go “That one concert is gonna draw a totally different group of people.” It’s all attractive in a very generalist kind of way and I think that’s appropriate. We are exploring the possibility of creating a season outside Symphony Hall and doing things that people would think of as cutting edge, collaborations with people who have not worked orchestra before or forays into the singer-songwriter or indie rock sort of thing. But it’s very hard to fit into the context of the other concerts we do. It’s a balance of what we’d like to do and what can be done.
     The new kid is Steve Martin, banjo player extraordinaire. I think people have realized his bluegrass music is not a joke.
    He’s a very serious musician, which is funny because most people – those of us of a certain age -think of him playing with an arrow through his head.  His collaboration with not only the Pops but the Steep Canyon Rangers, the band he works with, is a serious celebration of American bluegrass and has a lot of pieces composed by Mr. Martin. This is the first time that he has done anything with an orchestra. We wondered about how great it would be to get Steve Martin here for years. I think the man’s a genius as a comic, but with Steve, creativity goes in a lot of different directions. I just read one of his novels and he’s quite a good writer. We approached him and he bit, saying “I think it’ll be a really interesting collaboration and we’re really excited about it.”  I am too.
    Will there be humor?
     I hope so, but I have no idea if he does humorous things. When you collaborate you have to agree to surrender a degree of control. I’m not sure he can help doing humorous things.
     John Williams is back again with Film Nights.
     It changes every years. Because he’s still doing six films a year, there’s always new material. He has an encyclopedic  knowledge of film, not just his own film scores, but pretty much everybody’s. It’s one of reasons that night has remained resolutely popular. It is not the same thing year after year. We re lucky to still have him with us and willing to do this. He turned 80 in February and though he’s not much into public celebrations , a little ‘Happy Birthday, John’ may go into it.

    Your “unifying theme” is “Visions of America” and you’ve also got an audience photo contest as a component. Can you explain?

      This concept was brought to us a couple of years ago by photojournalist/historian Joseph Sohm cqwho’s spent 30 years answering to his own satisfaction one question: How do you photograph democracy?  How do you take enough pictures to show the diversity and immensity of this country that has somehow pulled together, more or less, over two-and-a-quarter centuries? The whole ideas from the beginning from him has been this is not just him telling you what America is, it’s to get you to think about what America is and what it should be, what its problems are, what its strengths are, so the idea of a photo contest is to reflect the question back to the audience, rather than just having to accept what we give them. The evening itself is an hour-long journey, a photo symphony, a heavily choreographed thing with the music played by the Boston Bops with music by Grammy award winner and Newton native Roger Kellawaycq and lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Cq Joe is very passionate about this, and says not only is it the 225th anniversary of the Constitution, but more importantly a presidential election year and a year in which the fractiousness seems to have reached an entirely new level. I think the scariest thing is we seem to have lost the level of civility that allows for disagreement. One of the things Joe likes to think about is what are unifying forces rather than the divisive forces?
   Your role in the political discourse?
    As conductor of the Boston Pops, I am apolitical. I am not in real life, but the basic thing is we work with whoever gets elected and we hope that music is a common element and a unifying force as opposed to something only one side of the spectrum wants to hear.
    You’ve got three got sports nights, too.
     We’re doing these “City of Champions” concerts, paying tribute to the four teams that have brought seven championships over the past decade.  May 23rd and 25th are generally proportional to all of the teams. May 24th is specifically a Red Sox night, part of their Fenway 100th salute. We did the whole Red Sox album [in 2008] and there’s a wonderful piece we’re bringing back from the ‘50s, by George Kleinsinger, ca who gave us “Tubby the Tuba.” It was written for the Brooklyn Bums, the Dodgers, and it’s called “The Brooklyn Baseball Cantata” and the piece languishes on the shelf because there are no more Brooklyn Dodgers and there’s only faint historical interest, but it’s really charming. It tells the story of a great day where the home nine played their best and came back against their arch enemies, the Yankees. And because Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Red Sox have the same number of syllables all of a sudden we have reinvented this piece as “The Boston Baseball Cantata.”
    What’s the best relatively unknown collaborator?
     The sleeper, I would say, is a program on June 12th , which features this group Time for Three. To me, they define what crossover from the classical side of the aisle can be. They’re amazing, players, two violinists and a bass player who are young and hip and play ridiculously well. They’ve been in all worlds, classical, jazz improvisation, gypsy, klezmer, and bluegrass. We appeared with them when we played Carnegie Hall in March. I wanted to bring them back. Nobody knows who they are and they deserve a rabid following.

Tickets: $22-$92. Check website below for specific shows and start times.

This is an expanded version of a feature that ran in the Cape Cod Times, www.capecodonline.com.)

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