In 2023, popular music has a bafflingly amorphous definition. The orchestra aims to champion popular music. The Pops mission is right there in its name. Also in that program will be a new, original orchestra piece using the themes of Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.” Closing the month will be piano icons Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Michael Feinstein collaborating with Lockhart to premiere a show celebrating George Gershwin and his peers. Later in May, trumpet virtuoso Bryon Stripling explores the styles of Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and more. What starts with a musical based on early jazz rags evolves into a season including different permutations of jazz.
Ragtime music full#
“Ragtime: The Symphonic Concert” kicks off a 2023 Spring Pops Season full of jazz and Broadway, expected programming and surprises.
The reimagining debuts at Symphony Hall May 12 and continues with two Saturday performances. The Pops pulled the show’s original creative team together – Ahrens, composer Stephen Flaherty, and the late librettist Terrence McNally – to build a new arrangement of the musical. You could have written it about 21st century America instead of turn-of-the-century 20th century America.” “But it is so frighteningly relevant to the time we are living in… The show is about various groups of Americans and how they experience the American dream or how they experience being denied the American dream.
“Oddly enough given all the Tony Awards it won, it is sometimes overlooked in the pantheon of great musicals,” Lockhart told the Herald. When “Ragtime” debuted on Broadway in 1997, the musical was overshadowed by blockbuster “The Lion King.” But in “Ragtime,” Lockhart sees a complex and compelling work of art that speaks to America’s past and present. Corresponding with lyricist Lynn Ahrens about the Boston Pops production of “Ragtime: The Symphonic Concert,” conductor Keith Lockhart had a simple question: “How does it feel to look back at this and say, ‘Wow, we wrote a masterpiece’?”
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