Speaking With...

David Ballantyne speaks with Conductor Keith Lockhart

David Ballantyne: Our special guest on Preview! is one of the rising stars of American orchestral music, Keith Lockhart. Very good to talk to you, Keith.

Keith Lockhart: Thanks David, good to talk to you.

DB: Now the first thing to say, I suppose, about your career, is that you are the current music director of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and that you took over from John Williams, didn’t you, in 1995?

KL: Right, I’m in my fourteenth season as conductor of the Boston Pops, and actually just completing my tenth season as music director of the Utah Symphony in Salt Lake City.

DB: Right. John Williams, that’s quite a pair of shoes to step into, isn’t it?

KL: Well, and before him, of course, Arthur Fiedler, who pretty much invented the genre. You know, I’ve always said that it’s better to follow people who are great successes even though it may be a little bit more intimidating because then you have a healthy organization to work with.

DB: Looking at your CV, you’ve been pretty much connected with what we might call orchestral pops, haven’t you, for some time?

KL: Well, I think I’ve actually been very fortunate to have a wonderfully balanced plate. I’ve been with the Utah Symphony for a decade now, that’s one of the country’s 52-week fulltime major orchestras, so I’ve had an opportunity to both have a very populist, if you will, podium in Boston and to continue to grow as an artist doing the more traditional symphonic fare and new music, et cetera while out in Utah.

DB: Well it’s great to be able to achieve that kind of balance. But looking at titles like The Boston Pops Play Glenn Miller, American Visions, Your Favorite Things, Richard Rogers Celebration, you seem to be, well, let’s say not uncomfortable with the idea of popular orchestral music.

KL: Well I think that the Boston Pops, by its very nature, is the original crossover entity before anybody invented the word crossover, and it’s wonderful to be associated with an institution that takes music as it comes, and doesn’t make those judgments about “this is appropriate for an orchestra,” or “this is not appropriate.” We play the wide variety of American musical expression. We play lots of Broadway, we play lots of jazz, we celebrate American composers, and I think that’s a very important position to occupy.

DB: Yeah, that’s something I wanted to ask you about. You do stake out a very American position, and it is largely modern, 20th- Century American popular orchestral music. Which I suppose prompts me to ask you, do you have unfulfilled ambitions in the other direction perhaps? I know you’ve told us that with the Utah Symphony you play more of the European type of repertoire…

KL: Well, no I don’t, I mean we all have unfulfilled ambitions I suppose, but as I said, the hallmark of my career that has made me very satisfied is that I don’t have to make those choices. I’m completing my first Mahler cycle in Utah now, I’ve recorded with them—not a Mahler symphony cycle—but we’ve recorded the Rachmaninov symphonic dances and some new music and that sort of thing. No, I’m very lucky. I get to pick, I think, from the best of both worlds.

DB: Could I just throw a quote back at you? You said once that a good orchestra is not full of sheep; would you mind enlarging on that?

KL: (laughs) Well I don’t remember having said that; it sounds like a great quote though. I wish I had!

DB: It’s about recognizing the individual talents of musicians within an orchestra…

KL: Right, I’ve just begun to place that. I mean, essentially the job, people often, from the non-musician public, think of an orchestra as something that is just frozen there, unable to do anything without the magic wave of the stick from in front. While in reality the relationship between an ensemble and a conductor is a lot more nuanced than that, and a lot of it involves getting just like any good manager would, getting the best out of your employees, getting these people to want to play at their best, at their highest level artistically, and embracing that and shaping that. It’s not always about what the conductor, what I want to do, it’s about molding what an individual artist wants to do in a context that makes sense.

DB: Now Keith I know that you have a local connection here and I want to ask, your connection with the Brevard Music Center here in North Carolina, is that in some way a debt of gratitude for you?

KL: Well, I have a lot of connections with the Carolinas in general actually, my grandparents moved to Western North Carolina when I was 8 years old, in the mid ’60s, and I’ve been spending time in the Carolina mountains ever since; partly due to that I did my undergraduate training at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, not to far over the border. But the connection specifically with Brevard is that I was a high school student there in the mid 970s and it was really a transforming place. It’s the place where I had my first conducting lessons, it’s the place I first heard a non-student orchestra, on a regular basis, playing great repertoire. The place has a lot of very positive memories for me, I think it’s one of the most nurturing educational institutions for young people that we have in this country, and I’ve tried to stay involved with them, even as my career has gone other places. I’ve been coming back doing concerts, working with students, teaching there over this last decade to fifteen years. They finally convinced me that the best way to make a mark on it was to come back and take some sort of leadership role. This year will be my inaugural year in the artistic director role.

DB: The first time you conducted, that was Brevard?

KL: It was the first time I had any formal conducting lessons.

DB: Give us a sneak preview. What is going on at Brevard this year?

KL: This is a very exciting season! We’ve tried very much to tell a story about what we intend to do educationally here, about having artists with the orchestra who are going to really roll up their sleeves and work with our students. We start this season off on June 27 with Yo-Yo Ma joining me for a performance of the Dvorak Cello Concerto. I’m thrilled and honored that Yo-Yo is joining us. I called him and I said “Yo Yo, you’ve got to come and play my premiere here!” During the rest of the season we have Macon, Georgia violinist Bobby McDuffie joining me, we have JoAnn Falletta, the acclaimed conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic with Leila Josefowicz playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto. We have repertoire like Scheherazade, Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, La Mer, Les Preludes, the Mahler 1st and 5th Symphonies and Brahms’ 2nd Symphony. It’s just a great season of great music. We have wonderful chamber series at the Porter center, Brevard College; three great operas, The Magic Flute, The Mikado, and a contemporary American opera Little Women by Mark Adamo. I think it’s going to be a great season that showcases what the center can do on all fronts.

DB: It’s sounds like an extremely exciting season to come!

The new CD from The Five Browns, “Browns in Blue,” is available for purchase using the Arkivmusic service at TheClassicalStation.org.