ART TALKS at The Artistic Forum

Keith Lockhart

At 44-years old Keith Lockhart has achieved a remarkable degree of success in his life: he is conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra - was offered the job at 35 -- and as he notes not the youngest to fill the shoes of conductor -- is happily married, his wife Lucia Lin is a violinist with the Pops, and he is the father of a five month old son, Aaron, of whom he is quite obviously proud.

With all his success and world fame he still exhibits that "awe shucks" nice guy demeanor that strikes one as both genuine and refreshing, and as we talked, infectious. I come to the conclusion early on in our conversation that this guy is genuine. I make a notation on the side of my prep sheet that he laughs easily and with what seems a tinge of self-consciousness, and that he's not the least bit shy about admitting a certain amount of plain old fashioned luck, in addition to hard work and talent, as reasons for his remark-able success.

Don't be deceived though. He's not just lucky. He has a resume and record of accomplishment that fits his stature as Maestro: In addition to the Pops, he is also the Music Di-rector of the recently merged Utah Symphony & Opera, a position he has held since 1998. In 1999 he ended his tenure as Music Director of the Cincinnati Chamber Orches-tra, a position he held for seven years. And to his degrees from Furman and Carnegie Mellon University add three Honorary Doctorates from the Boston Conservatory, North-eastern and Furman Universities.

He is responsible for producing Best Selling CDs (two of the Pops six CDs have won Grammy awards), made trips abroad - on New Year's Eve 2002 he conducted the Deutsches Symphonie Orchestra in Berlin, last year he was off to Amsterdam to conduct a performance with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and in 2005 he will make his first European tour with the Utah Symphony. Add to all this: concerts, guest conductorships, five hundred Pops performances since taking the baton in 1995, "about 140 concerts a year, almost every other day" and 44 television appearances, and you begin to see why it interested us here at OperaOnline.us how in the world he was going to squeeze in Tosca, this March and April, with the Boston Lyric Opera.

"It's a consistently challenging profession" he says matter-of-factly of his schedule, "and it remains challenging right up until the time you're not breathing anymore." Indeed.

If you were to ask Keith Lockhart if, as a young boy or even teenager, he could have anticipated all this, it would have been the farthest thing from his mind. I ask him if lightening struck. "I'm not certain I had an epiphany," he says of his start in music. He de-scribes it more as "a slow takeover". He played the piano at the age of seven, studied clarinet at ten, and throughout grade and high school made music and participation in music events an integral part of his social life. "By the time I headed off to college," he says, "my life was surrounded by music. It really snuck up on me. I was in a band, a chorus, an orchestra, even a marching band."

He eventually graduated with a degree in piano, German - yeah, German - and a minor in clarinet. If there was an epiphany, he says, it came in 1980 while attending the Summer Music Festival in Aspen. Not yet past his mid-twenties, Keith Lockhart observed "older colleagues pursuing this as their life's work," and said to himself: "Yeah, I can do this." The "this" he was referring to was the subject that was on his mind at the time: could he make a career change from musician to conductor?

After Aspen he went back to school, his mind made up. "I went specifically to study with someone I wanted to study with." His mentor was Ishtvan Jaray, a Hungarian conductor. He studied two years for his advanced degree at Carnegie Mellon, followed by six years of teaching. He started teaching at 23. But teaching was not where his heart was. "During this period I was desperately trying to get out of teaching," he says, noting again his mindset after Aspen,1980. He wanted to conduct. "When you teach, the New York Phil-harmonic doesn't come calling."

His big break came in 1988 when he won an award as assistant conductor with the Akron Symphony Orchestra. "The General Manager went on to Cincinnati and the next year they were looking for a conductor. People believed in me and knew my work." Keith Lockhart had arrived. If it was a little bit of luck that landed him his first conducting job, it would be hard work and exceptional talent that moved him on.

It was while in Cincinnati that he made friends with others in Boston, and friendships and contacts were forged. "I got to know the manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra," he says of his developing professional associations, "and when John Williams said he was going to leave I got the call." It was during this period, he says, when he occasionally shuttled back and forth to Boston, and in 1993 specifically, when he guest conducted the Pops, that he met his future wife, fellow musician Lucia Lin, whose mutual interest in skiing, mountain biking and hiking ensured more than a casual attraction.

With John Williams' announcement, things moved very quickly. "I began conducting negotiations while shuttling back and forth between Cincinnati and Europe - and the news was leaking." He recalls the frenetic pace this way: "I came back and did a press confer-ence and in three months was doing my first concert. I got thrown into it fast. I really didn't have time to think about it. I didn't set a goal as being a Pops conductor. It's just one of those opportunities you just can't say no to. I knew then that it was going to alter my life in a way that I just had to throw myself into it and see what happened."

He was thirty-five years old. The year was 1995.

I comment on his meteoric rise from teaching to conducting to conducting professional orchestras. "From the outside it looked like it happened overnight," he says of his career progress, "but it didn't look that way from the inside." He reminds me of the years when he taught where "I took every audition I could take. I was certain I didn't want to teach for the rest of my career."

His match with the Boston Pops was perfect. Even at the beginning where he was con-ducting men and women who were in the business while he was still in school - high school - he found a "common ground of musical expression." He was talented, young, handsome and energetic and brought with him from the start, that broad smile, a straight back, wavy dark hair - and plenty of it - and his own unique persona that spells celebrity for those lucky enough to possess it. When Keith Lockhart steps onto the stage to conduct the audience sits up and pays attention. He commands attention because he so obviously enjoys what he does and communicates it in his every move on stage. "It's amazing," he reflects of his time in Boston, "my tenth season is coming up. I finally have tenure," he adds with that infectious, self-deprecating humor I have now come to expect and like.

And now the opera.

Lockhart conducting.

Lockhart says he was approached about six years ago to do an opera in Boston but was "sanguine" about the offer. Where would he fit it in? "Stephen Lord (music director of the Boston Lyric) talked to me about the possibility of doing something and I was very sanguine about it. The problem is, I do about 140 concerts a year, almost every other day. To set aside five or six weeks to do an opera is a major commitment."

He was approach again six month ago to do Tosca and this time he assented. "Now that I have the luxury of turning some things down," he says, "I get to pick more. I really wanted to do it, partially because of the Boston Lyric Opera, and because it

gives me the opportunity to do something else besides the Pops." Rehearsals for Tosca are slated to begin in February or March.

It's January, I say to myself, and he is scheduled to conduct on opening night, March 31st at Boston's Schubert Theater - a mere two months away, and rehearsals haven't even be-gun. Isn't he worried? Not yet, he tells me. I tell him of a review I read in the morning's New York Times criticizing the New York Met's presentation of Boris Godunov. "The Times criticized the whole thing because the ensemble was 'one rehearsal short of being ready'. One rehearsal!"

"The thing about opera," he says, his voice not betraying the slightest edge or worry, "is that they are perennially ill-rehearsed - and the Met, probably, has more rehearsal time than any regional opera. It's a mammoth task. With so many bells and whistles anything can go wrong." He's confident, nonetheless. "I know the vast majority of players because they probably work at Symphony Hall." As for his exposure to the medium, he remarks, "It's been a while. The last one I did was 97: Ballard of Baby Doe."

Clearly, Keith Lockhart is a guy who is comfortable with and clearly likes working in the pit, and he says so. "I love working in the pit, not always in the opera pit. In the 80s most of my musical work was in the musical theater. Like Sweeny Todd. And I always enjoyed that." When I asked him about the enormous amount of work involved in preparing for an opera - divas, Prima Donnas, temperamental tenors, complex sets, the very dark mood of Tosca, the whole opera thing itself, as if I have to remind him of what he is get-ting into, he answers, "You have more balls in the air, that's all." He pauses for a moment and produces another metaphor. "It's like riding a bike."

He views it as simply doing his job. The orchestra has its part, the singers have theirs, the set designers theirs and so forth, and how a rehearsal progresses is a process that is both
"notoriously vague and extremely exact". Many decisions "are judgment calls" that need to be adjusted as you move forward, he says, "and the conductor is the person who makes those judgment calls." He's used to the pressure, he says, exhibiting the kind of confidence in his abilities and the professionalism of others that has earned him the title, Maestro.

And so it is, when you're Keith Lockhart. It's what he does.
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Our reviewer, Paul Walkowski, is the writer and publisher of OperaOnline.us. His online opera ezine covers topics that may not be found in the mainstream journals, and approaches those subjects perhaps a little differently. OperaOnline.us strives to give its readers a sense of what it was and is like to be a member of an opera audience.