VERO BEACH — Keith Lockhart leads the Boston Pops in a ten-concert, nine-city tour of the southeast United States. The tour will feature a tribute to The Barbra Streisand Songbook with celebrated vocalist and award-winning songwriter Ann Hampton Callaway, whose songs are featured on six of Barbra Streisand’s recent albums. The Boston Pops’ 2013 Southeast USA Tour is sponsored by Fidelity Investments.
Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops will open their tour program with some of the most beloved themes from musical theater and film, including Marvin Hamlisch’s “Through the Eyes of Love,” from the film Ice Castles, and the overture to A Chorus Line, as part of a special tribute to the late composer and his most celebrated music.
Keith Lockhart will also lead the Boston Pops in such musical theater masterpieces as Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music, the title song from Jerry Herman’s musical Hello, Dolly!, and Jule Styne’s overture to Gypsy, as well as John Kander’s theme song to Martin Scorsese’s film New York, New York.
Ann Hampton Callaway, whom Keith Lockhart describes as having a “gorgeous voice and an unmatched musical intelligence,” takes center stage during the post-intermission set to sing “The Way We Were,” “Don’t Rain On My Parade,” and a medley of “People” and “Being Alive” also featuring American jazz pianist Ted Rosenthal.
The last leg of the tour will take place in Florida, beginning with a performance in Sarasota on Friday, March 1, at the Van Wezel Center at 8 p.m.
The Pops will then perform its first-ever concert in Melbourne on Saturday, March 2, at the Maxwell C. King Center for the Performing Arts at 8 p.m. followed by two performances in West Palm Beach on Sunday, March 3, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the Kravis Center.
Mr. Lockhart and the Pops will continue to Miami for a 7:30 p.m. concert at the Arsht Center on Tuesday, March 5, and conclude the tour in St. Petersburg with a 7:30 p.m. concert at the Mahaffey Auditorium on Wednesday, March 6.
ANN HAMPTON CALLAWAY
Ann Hampton Callaway is an insatiable creative spirit. As a champion of the Great American Songbook, she has made her mark as a singer, pianist, composer, lyricist, arranger, actress, educator, TV host, and producer.
A born entertainer, she has a unique singing style that blends jazz and traditional pop, making her a mainstay in concert halls, theaters, and jazz clubs as well as in the recording studio, on television, and in film.
She is best known for her Tony-nominated performance in the hit Broadway musical Swing! and for writing and singing the theme song to the hit TV series The Nanny.
Callaway is a platinum award-winning writer whose songs are featured on six of Barbra Streisand’s recent CDs, and she is the only composer to have collaborated with the legendary Cole Porter, setting her music to Porter’s posthumously discovered “I Gaze in Your Eyes.”
Ann Hampton Callaway has collaborated with the Boston Pops on four occasions, first during an “Evening at Pops” television special with Keith Lockhart in 1999 and most recently during the orchestra’s annual Pops By the Sea performance, heard live by over 15,000 people in Hyannis, MA in August 2012.
KEITH LOCKHART
Keith Lockhart became the twentieth conductor of the Boston Pops in 1995, adding his artistic vision to the Pops tradition established by his predecessors John Williams and Arthur Fiedler.
Mr. Lockhart has worked with a wide array of established artists from virtually every corner of the entertainment world while also promoting programs that focus on talented young musicians from the Tanglewood Music Center, Boston Conservatory, and Berklee College of Music.
During his eighteen-year tenure, he has conducted more than 1,400 Boston Pops concerts and introduced the innovative JazzFest and EdgeFest series, featuring prominent jazz and indie artists performing with the Pops.
Mr. Lockhart has also introduced concert performances of full-length Broadway shows, including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel and Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, and the PopSearch and High School Sing-Off competitions. Under his leadership, the Boston Pops has commissioned several new works and dozens of new arrangements.
Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Keith Lockhart began his musical studies with piano lessons at the age of seven. He holds degrees from Furman University in Greenville, S.C., and Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and has previously served as associate conductor of both the Cincinnati Symphony and Cincinnati Pops orchestras.
In August 2010, Mr. Lockhart was named principal conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra, leading that orchestra on a fifteen-city United States tour in November 2010. Mr. Lockhart leads the BBC Concert Orchestra on another US tour in 2013 just a few weeks before the Boston Pops Winter Tour.
In addition to guest conducting appearances in the United States and abroad, Mr. Lockhart also holds the titles of Artistic Director of the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina and Music Director Emeritus of the Utah Symphony.
Audiences worldwide love Keith Lockhart’s inimitable style, expressed not only through his consummate music-making, but also by his unique ability to speak directly to the audience about the music to which he feels so passionately committed. Visit www.KeithLockhart.com for further information.
BOSTON POPS BACKGROUND
Affectionately known as “America’s Orchestra,” the Boston Pops is the most recorded and arguably the most beloved orchestra in the country, beginning with the establishment of the modern-era Pops by Arthur Fiedler and continuing through the innovations introduced by John Williams and the new-millennium Pops spearheaded by Keith Lockhart.
With the 125th anniversary season in 2010, the Boston Pops reached a landmark moment in a remarkable history that began with its founding in 1885 by Civil War veteran Henry Lee Higginson, who founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra (sister organization to the Boston Pops) four years earlier in 1881.
From the start, Mr. Higginson intended to present, in the warmer months, concerts of light classics and the popular music of the day. From a practical perspective, Higginson realized that these “lighter” performances would provide year-round employment for his BSO musicians.
The “Promenade Concerts,” as they were originally called, were soon informally known as “Popular Concerts,” which eventually became shortened to “Pops,” the name officially adopted in 1900.
Some people may not realize that there were seventeen Pops conductors, beginning with the German Adolf Neuendorff, who preceded Arthur Fiedler, the first American-born musician to lead the orchestra.
Having led more than 1,400 Boston Pops concerts, Keith Lockhart (1995-present) has served eighteen seasons as Boston Pops Conductor. In response to the ever-diversifying trends in music, Keith Lockhart has taken the Pops in new directions, creating programs that reach out to a broader and younger audience by presenting a wide range of artists, both established performers and rising stars, while maintaining the Pops’ appeal to its core audience.
Mr. Lockhart’s tenure has been marked by a dramatic increase in touring, the orchestra’s first Grammy nominations, the first major network national broadcast of the Fourth-of-July spectacular, and the release of the Boston Pops’ first self-produced and self-distributed recordings.
The Boston Pops, under the direction of Keith Lockhart, has released four self-produced recordings: Sleigh Ride, America, Oscar & Tony, The Red Sox Album, and The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers, featuring the voices of Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, and Cherry Jones.
In September 2009, the Boston Pops released its first digital-download only recording of its wildly popular arrangement of The Twelve Days of Christmas, and a new Christmas album is scheduled to be released during the 2013 holiday season.
