Keith Lockhart on his 30th anniversary and the Pops’ spring season

Keith Lockhart is, by his own admission, not a fan of anniversaries. But, well, 30 years with the Boston Pops is a big deal — he’s surpassed every one of his predecessors except for Arthur Fiedler, and by a wide margin — and the conductor acknowledges that some things involving the orchestra are outside even his control. Nodding at the pandemic-canceled 2020 season, he says, “I think everybody feels bad that I didn’t have a 25th.”

But like it or not, a milestone like this is an opportunity for both reflection and for looking ahead. And the latter can take the form of finding new frontiers to explore, both with the Pops and, potentially, outside of it. When asked how he’ll know when it’s time to step down, Lockhart chuckles. “Yeah, I ask myself that same question more and more these days,” he says. “I think at a point that I’m sitting there offstage ten minutes before going on and going, ‘I don’t really want to do this.’ The problem is, of course, being honest enough with yourself to actually feel that happening.”

To that end, Lockhart has a simple rubric for staying put: “For now, as long as I feel like, number one, I got something to contribute, and number two, I want to contribute it. As long as I can answer those two questions in the affirmative. It’s an amazing place to be. Possibly because I’ve been here almost half my life, I can’t really imagine being anywhere else.”

Boston.com: You’ve got Cynthia Erivo as your opening night (May 8).

Keith Lockhart: Yeah. Aren’t we lucky? [laughs]

When did the wheels start turning for that?

She’s been on our list for a couple of years, because she’s a fabulous performer. But it finally came clear that we were going to get her for this season, and we got her for opening day. We knew she was coming out in “Wicked” and then fortunately had that all set before everybody in the known world knew who Cynthia Erivo is, which is pretty much the case now. We’re thrilled. I mean, she’s amazing on stage. She’s an amazing, electric performer, and it’s one of those wonderful times when we got somebody while we still could.

How did you land on Orville Peck as this year’s guest artist for Pride Night (June 5)?

We were looking for a representative of that community who was really doing interesting things. And I don’t follow a country a lot, and in particular, what’s current. So this masked guy singing was sent to me and I looked at it and said, “Well, he looks good. Is he popular?” And then he got the Eddie Redmayne role (The Emcee) in “Cabaret” [on Broadway] and we were kind of like, wow, this dropped out of the sky into our laps too.

You’ve got George Takei hosting Music Of The Cosmos (May 23-24). Did you come up with the program just to have an excuse to be nearby as George Takei speaks? I feel like that’s a bucket list item for a lot of people.

You know, we started looking at who would be appropriate to host this. Originally the second half of the program was going to be a melange of various outer space stories in science fiction. But then I decided that there was so much great “Star Trek” music, and 23 different composers have been associated with it. It’s funny, when you think of the monolith that is “Star Wars,” “Star Trek” has been in some part of our consciousness for 60 years now. And to have one of the originals … If Chris Pine had said, “Sure, I’ll do it,” that would have been a good thing, too.

And then you could have done some Sondheim as well.

Exactly. But having George … I had a zoom call with him, and wow, is he totally together at 88. And we thought, that’s perfect, actually. It just ticks all the boxes. And, yeah, as a kid who grew up on “Star Trek” reruns, it’s amazing to connect to that part of your life. And so we’re thrilled to have him.

That concert also features astronaut and Needham native Sunita Williams, who just recently returned from an eight-day mission to the International Space Station that turned into nine months. Were you worried that you’d have to have her participate over Zoom?

Well, that was always a danger until she was actually on terra firma. And even then, there were things about NASA’s scheduling of her required medical evaluations and things like that. I don’t know if you remember, but she actually participated via Zoom last July 4.

It was hysterical, actually, because on July 1, when I’m, you know, kind of focusing on what’s ahead, I got this phone call from … Actually, it was better, my wife got this phone call from some guy at NASA. [chuckles] And she was like, “You better call this person back.” So I called them back, and they said, “Suni would really like to be able to participate in some way in the Fourth of July concert.” So we did a Zoom call with the space station, which was pretty amazing in itself. I was on stage interviewing her during the day, because the timing didn’t work out for during the concert, just in terms of where the where the vehicle was. At that point, I said, “We’ve got to have you as soon as you get back,” and we started building this program.

It seemed she was going to be back a lot earlier than she was. And then I did start going, well, what if she doesn’t get here? But fortunately, she’s in the house. I had an email exchange with her about a week before she came back, which is cool in itself. Getting emails from space is fun. And she was so obviously into it that we really wanted to honor that and honor her, a real American hero who is one of us.

The Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration (June 3-4) is coming back to the Pops this season. How do you square what the Pops do, which is strictly composed symphonic works, with what Garcia did, where open-ended improvisation was so fundamental?

Well, as you know, that’s a question in a lot of the straddling-worlds work that we do. And what it obviously relies on is, for one thing, having a band that’s musically astute enough to be able to play with an orchestra and their strictures of having to have the thing more or less unfold the same way twice. And you’re right, because [there were] whole generations of people who followed the [Grateful] Dead around just to hear what was different in every concert. But we can build in a lot of flexibility into the scores. That’s what repeats and open vamps are for, and things like that. So as long as the structure more or less remains the same, it doesn’t need to be a compulsively note-perfect sort of a thing.

Even at this distinguished point in your career, do you still get starstruck over any of the performers that you meet or get to perform with?

Some over the years. And it’s not arrogance on my part, it’s just not my job to be starstruck, you know? It’s my job to to figure out how best to work with that particular person. But certainly, some of the people who are older legends and people whom I grew up [with] … I remember, for instance, Roberta Flack in one of my early July Fourth concerts and having her sing the two big hits with the Pops was just amazing, standing there and going, “And I’m standing next to her.”

The last few years have seen a handful of movies about conductors. What did you think of “Maestro” and “Tár”?

[laughs] I have not seen “Tár,” nor do I intend to. I have read with great delight all the arguments back and forth within and without my industry. But I know enough about this business at this point. You know which things are, I don’t know, exploitative and which things are manipulative. And I’ve seen the nature of the conducting profession maligned enough to just not want to bother. [laughs]

I have seen “Maestro,” because obviously there’s a big BSO and Tanglewood connection and all that. I thought Bradley Cooper’s portrayal was wonderful, that it was as spot-on as a biopic could have been. But I really thought the movie should have been called “Felicia,” because I thought it was so much more about her struggles to deal with this person in some significant way than it was about him. So that’s my Roger Ebert moment. And I always laugh when they talk about people taking conducting lessons so they can look like they know what they’re doing.

Do they ever?

Not really, because you can see that they are very good mimes and they do exactly what they watched. The preparation, I’m sure, is absolutely huge, but at the end of the day, all those grand [Leonard] Bernstein gestures were meant to be causatory forces, not to accompany a performance. And I think at least from my perspective, you can always tell the difference between whether somebody is looking like they conduct or actually conducting. And that’s no disrespect, because when Robert Redford played “The Natural,” I didn’t think he could actually hit the ball out and hit the skylight.

The Boston Pops 2025 Spring Season runs Thursday, May 8, through Saturday, June 7, at Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Ave., Boston.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social