It’s hard to fathom what the Boston Pops gets itself into with its annual Holiday Pops marathon, which takes up most of December at Symphony Hall. Last year, this orchestra played essentially the same program, with a few tweaks for family shows, 42 times in a bit less than three weeks. Santa Claus attended every concert.
Boston audiences have come to expect that certain items will appear on the bill: Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” for example, and a dramatic reading of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The best of them, at least for wit, is David Chase’s monstrously inventive arrangement of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” which quotes Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “Oklahoma!” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Sung with gusto, usually by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, it surprises every time you hear it.
Then again, the whole Holiday Pops enterprise is something of a surprise. In the performances last December, the musicians of the Pops — essentially the Boston Symphony Orchestra without most of its principals — never seemed to look bored, and some had enough ho, ho, ho in them to wear a seasonal hat or even dance onstage. Musical standards remained admirably high.
At the center of it all is Keith Lockhart, who is marking 30 years with the Pops this season. Hosting and conducting almost all of the dates in December, he often led three a day, sometimes following a pair of gigs at Symphony Hall with an evening concert at the helm of the freelance Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, in places as far afield as New Hampshire or Connecticut. You would never know from seeing him kick a cancan in “The 12 Days of Christmas” that he has conducted “Sleigh Ride” more than 850 times, or that he is 65. Surviving this startling display of podium endurance with regular naps, he shows little sign of flagging.
The Pops offers a December and a spring season, this year beginning on May 8, plus a smattering of Tanglewood concerts and its annual July 4 celebration, played by the Esplanade Orchestra before hordes thronging Boston’s Hatch Shell. During Lockhart’s tenure, Holiday Pops has become the centerpiece of the calendar. Created in 1973, the revels grew gradually under his predecessors, Arthur Fiedler and John Williams, but have since come to rival Boston Ballet’s “Nutcracker” for sprawl: They sell about 90,000 seats, equivalent to roughly 70 percent of the tickets that the Boston Symphony sells in its entire regular concert season. Factor in food and drink receipts, and this is the kind of thing that it’s easy to think cynically about.
But that is not what is going on, or at least not only what is going on. Lockhart gives an eloquent speech, or three, on the meaning of the holiday season in a fractured world. He makes sure there is always new music, most recently “Carol of the Brown King,” a David Coleman setting of Nativity poems by Langston Hughes. Nobody makes him include “L’Adorazione dei Magi,” a decidedly obscure work by Respighi, but it’s his favorite piece of holiday music, so he does it every few years anyway. Even Chad Smith, the avowed progressive who serves as president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony, admires “the beautiful, quiet subversiveness of the way that Keith programs it.”
For many in Boston, attending Holiday Pops is a tradition; Lockhart sees it serving the same role that church once did. “I try to make the concert not just play ‘All I Want For Christmas,’ but have some spiritual significance to it, something that ties it together,” he said. “In other words,” he added, “not just crassly commercial.”
At one concert near the end of the run last year, Lockhart conducted the crowd in a Joe Reisman medley, “A Merry Little Sing-Along.” Phone flashlights soon appeared, hundreds of them, swaying in the dark. By some weird magic, it wasn’t cringe-worthy but enchanting.
THE BOSTON POPS has spent 140 years figuring out how to offer popular entertainment that is artistically meaningful, with an orchestra of quality at its heart. Other dedicated Pops orchestras are still around, not least the Cincinnati Pops, and every major orchestra gives pops concerts in one form or another. The Boston outfit still dominates the field.
Lockhart is its inescapable face, and recently extended his contract through 2027. He has drawn more than his fair share of flack over the years: He came to the job young, quickly became a local celebrity, and is presiding at a time when it has proved impossible for the Pops to maintain the imperious position in American popular culture built by Fiedler from 1930 to his death in 1979, when he was eulogized as “the maestro of the masses.”
But Lockhart remains a crucial, beloved figure for the Boston Symphony, most of whose players he conducts far more often than their music director. And he has the experience and skills of a proper musician: He led the Utah Symphony for 11 years and has been artistic director of the Brevard Music Center Summer Institute and Festival since 2007. “He comes in knowing what he’s going to do, and we just follow him,” said Suzanne Nelsen, a Pops bassoonist.
His collaborators are similarly effusive. “Keith and the musicians, they know where the beat is,” said Branford Marsalis, the jazz saxophonist, “so it never feels like it falls into affectation or stereotype, which are the worst experiences ever.” Ben Folds, the singer-songwriter, applauded the Pops for keeping the dignified environment of a symphony orchestra intact. “When you’re playing with Keith,” he said, “he’s taking the inside of your music seriously.” Bernadette Peters, Broadway royalty, confided that on her phone, she keeps a secret recording of the Pops performing a lullaby she wrote about a dog. “He gets all these players to play as a whole, and make music with me,” she said of Lockhart. “It’s basically a miracle.”
Lockhart is also one of the few conductors today who is deeply rooted in his community, so much so that even its baseball team speaks highly of him. Alex Cora, the manager of the Boston Red Sox, appeared at the Holiday Pops in 2018, and last year invited Lockhart to talk to his players at spring training.
“It was good for our guys, especially seeing it from a different perspective,” Cora said. “Probably for them, it was like: ‘Oh, he’s a conductor, what is it, what’s the big thing? He’s just, you know, moving his hands and whatever.’ No, no, no, no, he’s doing a lot from that platform. It was good to have him around.”
WHEN LOCKHART TOOK OVER the Pops, it was still recognizably the institution that Fiedler had made famous. Henry Higginson, who founded the Boston Symphony in 1881, created a series of spring Promenade Concerts four years later, offering overtures, waltzes, marches and so on. It was a populist enterprise from the start; the scholar Ayden Adler has noted that the public called the concerts “Pops” long before the Symphony adopted the brand. Symphony Hall, finished in 1900, was designed to serve both, with rows of seats that could be replaced with tables.
Over time, the blurry line between “classical” and “popular” concerts became clearer, leaving the Pops free to chase commercial success, though not at the expense of musical values; only at the end of Fiedler’s concerts did he let loose with Broadway medleys or Beatles tunes. From 1980 to 1993, Williams, his successor, took the Pops in new directions, above all in film music, but left the format much as he found it. “My 45-year association with this brilliant ensemble continues to be one of the great joys of my musical life,” he said in an email.
Lockhart has kept the Pops standing even as many of the pillars on which it was built have crumbled. If anything beyond dropping Old Glory in “The Stars and Stripes Forever” made the Pops “America’s Orchestra,” as Lockhart called it early on, it was television. But PBS ended 35 years of “Evening at Pops” broadcasts in 2005, and the July 4 concert more recently met a similar fate. Fiedler was one of the great studio artists of his era, selling 50 million records, and Williams shipped plenty of his own; Lockhart has made some, but he has not escaped the collapse of the classical recording industry.
Subtler forces are at work, too. Classical music has moved further from the mainstream, so finding an audience that knows the lighter repertoire that the Pops made its own has become impossible on the scale it once did. Entertainment has been repackaged: Fiedler’s Pops barely announced its programs in advance, but Lockhart’s is driven by guest artists, thematic concerts and film screenings.
Even the way that the Pops sells tickets has changed tellingly. “One of the secrets of the Pops’ success was building ticket sales on a wholesale, not retail, model,” the former Symphony general manager Thomas W. Morris recently wrote. For decades after the 1930s, the Pops sold tickets primarily to groups rather than individuals, to the alumni associations and Rotary clubs that helped knit the ensemble into the fabric of community life. Going to the Pops was an inherently social affair; now, though, we bowl alone. Group sales peaked at 90 percent and remained near 80 percent in the 1980s. They accounted for 16 percent of Holiday Pops tickets last year.
“It’s not just cultural consumption, it’s sociological,” Lockhart said of the transformation of the Pops. “It’s the way people interact with each other.”
CAN THE POPS retain its place in American musical culture? The question is most urgent outside the festive season, when there is less of a hook for audiences to grab hold of. Holiday Pops sold at 87 percent of capacity last year, but Spring Pops languished at 69 percent. Projections look more promising for the coming season, which includes a night with Cynthia Erivo; a cosmic program starring the astronaut Suni Williams and George Takei of “Star Trek” fame; and “Jaws” and “Frozen” with live soundtracks.
“Sometimes Pops feels a little bit like a genre without an identity,” Smith said. “The identity of Pops has to be contemporary. It has to be urgent. It has to be trying to be on the bleeding edge, but recognizing that it is a populist art form.”
Charting a future for the Pops is crucial for the Symphony broadly; it brings in roughly half the revenue that the organization earns from its orchestral concerts. Pops concerts are starting to spread across the calendar, and Smith said that it is finding more ways to serve the city, pointing to a Day of the Dead concert last November and an annual Pride celebration.
Whatever the Pops plays, and whomever it plays with, Lockhart wants to make sure that it adheres to at least one of its founding theories. “We’ve always insisted that the orchestra, at some level, remain the star of its show,” he said. “We want to make sure the audience realizes we’re there.”
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