Conductor Reaching Out to Audiences

(first published in The Cincinnati Post Nov. 18, 1991)

Last week Cincinnati Symphony assistant conductor Keith Lockhart climbed into a time machine onstage at Music Hall and traveled "Bach to the Future."

Saturday at 10:30 a.m. he returns to Music Hall to conduct Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" on the CSO's Casual Classics series.

The Spielberg conveyance will be gone - that was for the 10,000 third- to sixth-graders who attended the CSO's young people's concerts. But the thrust will be the same: making symphony concerts more appealing for today's audiences.

"There is an audience that is moving away from the traditional Friday and Saturday night subscription thing, whether it's because they find themselves very divided time-wise, or because they don't want to pay the sitter, or because it's expensive," Lockhart said.

"With Casual Classics, I tried to come up with a series that would take the barriers out of attending concerts. Programs are short (about one hour). You can bring kids. And nobody will frown on you if you don't wear a tie."

Like his young people's concerts, Casual Classics is a far cry from the typical symphony experience where "the conductor comes out, bows stiffly, then turns his back to you and basically ignores you for the whole rest of the concert," Lockhart said. "I talk to the audience - not to give them Music History 101, but to break down the barrier a little bit."

And Lockhart has an ideal medium for his message in the Berlioz symphony, which he calls "perhaps the most stunning example of programmatic music (music that tells a story) in symphonic literature."

Based on Berlioz's real-life infatuation with a Shakespearean actress, it spins a bizarre tale of a poet who dreams of murdering his beloved. "It has love, passion, murder, even ghosts," said Lockhart, who will narrate using excerpts from Berlioz's memoirs.

It won't be watered down, though.

"This is not a kiddie concert," he stressed; it's for people of all ages, including kids who are ready for a "really serious orchestral experience." (Should they get fidgety, the CSO is turning the Critic's Club into a "crying room," where the concert will be monitored on TV.)

Lockhart, 32, thinks new approaches must be tried to build the audience of the future.

"I think we have as a society lost an aural imagination almost completely. We have a visually stimulated society, and music, which is the only art form that is entirely non-visual, is at a disadvantage."

To even the score, classical music may have to tap into the visual as pop music has done. "Most of the adult audience are baby-boomers - the TV generation - and today's kids are one generation beyond that."

Lockhart's "laboratory" for new ideas is the CSO's educational concerts. Nov. 26, for example, he will present a program for junior- and senior-high schoolers (already sold out) featuring Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" with members of the Playhouse in the Park's intern company. Scenes from the play will be performed with music inspired by it, including Prokofiev, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Bernstein's "West Side Story."

"If we're not entertaining people," Lockhart said, "we're doing something mammothly wrong."

Keith Lockhart conducts Berlioz' "Symphonie Fantastique" on the CSO Casual Classics series at 10:30 a.m. Saturday at Music Hall. Tickets: $10, $7 for children under 16 (381-3300).