BOSTON — The 2021 Boston Pops online season opens on Mother’s Day with a program featuring music by and about women. Available starting May 6, the program “Boston Pops Celebrates Mother’s Day: Honoring Women” includes pieces by Joan Tower, Lerner and Loewe, Maurice Ravel, Rachel Bruerville, William Grant Still, and pop acts Carole King and ABBA. The piece by Still, inspired by Sargent Johnson’s sculpture “Mother and Child,” depicts the love and care mothers give.
The concert will also feature a special performance of the first movement of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Tanya Gabrielian, and the final movement from J.S. Bach’s “Double Concerto,” played by Boston Pops violinist Ala Jojatu and her daughter, violinist Maria Jojatu.
The Edge interviewed Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart last June, when there was no end in sight to this interminable slog of a pandemic. He was feeling a bit glum that day, but he talked about the orchestra’s travails in terms that were about as upbeat as you could expect a conductor to be when all his players are cruelly detained in the manner of exiled gods.
Our conversation with Keith this week was a much more cheerful affair than the one we had in June. True, all six of the Pops’ spring concerts are again being presented virtually. But with in-person performances at Tanglewood just weeks away, spirits are higher than they’ve been in a very long time throughout the BSO organization.
Keith, would you have believed one year ago that your 2021 spring concerts would still be done virtually?
The six programs we’re releasing virtually will take the place of what would normally be our 2021 spring season. And if you had told me a year ago that we wouldn’t be back in person at this time, I don’t think I would have believed you. But we’ve all learned lots of stuff over the last year.
Your May 6 program celebrates Mother’s Day. Is this an annual tradition for the Pops?
Our spring season usually starts around the second week of May, which tends to coincide with Mother’s Day. So it’s always been kind of a Sunday afternoon tradition to do a Boston Pops concert and then get people to find cool things to give their moms for Mother’s Day. We decided it would be a good way to kick off this season as well, and I hope a lot of people … If they don’t know what to get their moms, here’s the answer.
What is your mother’s favorite show tune?
Hoo! Boy! You know, she’s one of those mothers who say “That’s nice, dear!” to just about everything. So it’s kind of hard to know which one is her favorite — frustratingly so, sometimes. She really likes the “Sound of Music,” so I’d say something like “Doe, a Deer” or “Climb Every Mountain” — something like that.
Do you get your love of Broadway music from your mother?
No, to tell you the truth, my love of Broadway music is from two sources, actually. One of them is my mother’s father, my maternal grandfather. My mom grew up, for at least part of her childhood, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and my grandfather used to sneak away and go to the Broadway shows. I don’t think anyone else in the family was too much into them.
The other source of my Broadway love was my dad, who played the record player really well, then had lots and lots of cast albums of various great shows from the ’50s and ’60s and kind of laid some of that on me at an early age.
So your dad is the smoking gun?
He’s the smoking gun. It’s his fault, may he rest in peace.
Of the four newly recorded programs in the Pops’ spring 2021 schedule, which are you most proud of?
The stock answer is that it’s like your children: You’re equally proud of all of them. But I’m very proud of the innovation in the fourth of the newly recorded programs — the one about the roots of jazz. The Pops is no stranger to those sorts of American idioms, but we tried to find a new story to tell, a story about the varying strains that came together in the American soil and produced what is arguably the first and only original American music.
As you know, arts organizations are thinking a lot these days about the voices that have been forgotten or were dismissed because of race. Because, of course, a lot of those voices came from various Black music traditions that combined with European musical traditions to create something that nobody had ever heard before.
So, in this program, we’re starting from New Orleans street music and going through Joplin (the overture to his opera “Treemonisha”), a little bit of “Maple Leaf Rag,” which I’m going to sit down at the piano and try to dazzle people with, and music from James P. Johnson, the man who wrote “The Charleston,” which was really just an incredible, seminal force in the development of jazz in the teens and twenties. But here’s someone no one has heard of except for the fact that he wrote “The Charleston.”
And also music of Gershwin through Paul Whiteman, and music of Benny Goodman. And Dave Brubeck — kind of a belated tribute to the Brubeck centennial, which happened in late 2020, when all our plans were upended. That’s a pretty good list of what’s on that program.
When the Pops performed “Sophisticated Lady” in the Valentine’s Day concert last February, the quality of the string writing was conspicuously excellent, because bluesy string lines are almost impossible to notate properly, never mind perform. The effect was staggering.
I love that you say that! Let me tell you a little story. And this is not to denigrate the dead, but for many, many years after Leroy Anderson kind of went off on his own, Richard Hayman did 90 percent of the arranging for Arthur Fiedler, pretty much from the mid-’50s all the way through the ’60s and two thirds of the way through the ’70s … One of our librarians once made the comment that if we put them all together and played them end to end, we would have over 24 hours of Richard Hayman arrangements. And a lot of them, honestly — especially when they’re doing something as sophisticated and not-in-a-classical-voice as Duke Ellington — they come off a little dated, kind of Muzaky. And so a lot of them have been retired. But when we were looking — it was probably in ’99 when the Ellington centennial was — we started plowing through, because we had a lot of them, because Fiedler recorded with Duke Ellington. They did an album together recorded live at Tanglewood, in like ’57 or something like that.
And this one arrangement! I was like, “Holy Cow! This is Richard Hayman? This writing is amazing!” The song must have really inspired him, and he really dug deep. And you’re right: That arrangement passes the test of time. And I’ll tell you the other secret about it: It’s really, really hard! [laughs] We really had to work on it.
How often to you perform on keyboard with the Boston Pops?
I have over the years a few times. Frankly, most of them were a long time ago when I was young and foolish — or brave — it’s a fine line between those two things. I’ve been playing less and less with each passing year, but starting in March or April last year, when we were completely shut down, I started playing a little bit more, and did several things as part of the BSO, kind of virtual, at-home series. I did a couple of other things, worked on some Debussy.
And because conductors during a pandemic are the most pointless animals ever, because … you know, it’s hard enough to be a performing artist of any sort. But when you’re a performing artist who depends on gathering lots of other people together [laughs], then you’re in trouble.
But when you sit down and play “Maple Leaf Rag,” you’re definitely not useless at that point.
Well, you know, that’s the great thing. It’s nice to go back to your medium and create some sound yourself when you can’t create sound with others.
We look for all the small silver linings we can find in this period of time, and I think one of the things that’s been really good is that virtual performances give the audience a chance to see us in different lights — things they don’t usually see us doing in the normal parade of live concert experiences.
Not to mention being able to see certain players’ faces for the first time.
You’re right — and players as people. It’s something I’ve said a lot, that, just due to expediency, the one face that tends to be associated with an orchestra is the conductor’s. Like when my face is associated with the Boston Pops. But there’s 80 people in there, and a lot of them have really interesting stories and really interesting independent lives. Virtual performances give people a chance to take a deep dive into the people they’ve been supporting, kind of as a generic whole, for years.
