Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, Keith Lockhart, Conductor
Nobody else is going to tell you this and it’s something that you really ought to know:
The Boston Pops are cool.
There is a reason why Christmas music is so popular. It touches something deep inside us – maybe a need for tradition, maybe a way to participate in something bigger than ourselves, maybe a sense of fun – call it what you will. Try as hard as you want to dress Christmas music up in humor or cynicism. Perform it with barking dogs. Write songs about relatives getting run over by reindeer. The only reason this stuff works on any level is that we know, deep in our hearts that the traditional, sleighbell-filled, horns-and-choir classics are magical on some level.
Now, imagine that holiday music performed unabashedly and proudly with a full orchestra that really knows what it’s doing and a 50 person choir. That’s the Boston Pops.
The Pops’ pre-Christmas concert at the Verizon Wireless Arena, three days before Christmas was awfully good. The music was straight-forward Christmas music – a selection of semi-obscure classical pieces, like Respighi's Adoration of the Magi, (the second movement from his Three Botticelli Pictures) as well as extremely well-known classics like Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.
The high point of the evening was Mary’s Little Boy-Child, which has become something of a signature piece for the Pops. Performed with the full chorus and orchestra, this was an unexpected calypso song that was truly bizarre and oddly effective. Imagine a production number from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, somehow transformed into kick-butt classical music. That might give you an idea of what this performance was like. This wasn’t the only surprising number that the orchestra played however. Santa Claus is Coming To Town was done in a very jazzy, swing arrangement, complete with all the bassists twirling their instruments around in unison during the climax. The funkiest number of the evening was easily Kije Takes a Ride, in a klezmer arrangement.
The evening was full of the usual Pops touches, including a visit from Santa Claus (with perhaps the most painfully hokey jokes ever told) and a reading of "A Visit From Saint Nicholas" (The Night Before Christmas) by Governor-Elect Craig Benson. A sign of just how good the Pops’ arrangement of A Visit is, was that Benson, who obviously hadn’t been able to devote huge amounts of time to rehearsing his reading, was perfectly in time with the orchestra. The arrangement breaks into small periods of silence every ten to fifteen seconds, allowing whatever VIP reader is performing with them to catch up.
The most powerful number of the evening was probably Joy To the World, a comfortably familiar song, written to be belted out at full voice – both vocal and orchestral. This rendition was positively exultant, performed by a powerful brass section. Anything, any piece of music at all, becomes glorious when it is accompanied by tympani and cymbals, let alone Joy To the World.
The Boston Pops aren’t cool in a self-congratulating, ironic, retro-hip sort of a way. They are simply very, very good at what they do. What could be cooler than that?
