Theater-goers around the world are familiar with the overture to Lerner and Loewe's classic My Fair Lady. It's been heard on recordings, in concert halls, in regional productions of the show, and in high school versions of the Tony Award winning musical. Why, then, should it sound brand-new when heard on the Boston Pops' latest recording entitled "Oscar and Tony"? The first eight notes are crisp and clean, heralding a performance that fills the piece with vivacity and encourage the listener to pay careful attention to the rest of the music. What follows are romantic interludes that flow like honey and there is unusual perkiness in the selection's final moments. Conducted by Maestro Keith Lockhart, it's a true gem of a performance and one that beggars repeated hearings. "Really," comments the conductor, "that's my favorite cut on the album." 
Speaking in a phone conversation from North Carolina, the debonair Lockhart seems extraordinarily relaxed. On October 7, 2007, he married Emiley Zalesky, a woman who Lockhart describes as "an absolutely wonderful, perfectly right person." They had just returned from a honeymoon in Africa. "It was very cool. We were there for about twelve days in Kenya and Tanzania and it was truly an out-of-this world experience like nothing I've ever had before. Right now it's very weird to be back in the urban jungle." Lockhart has a four-year-old son, Aaron, from a previous marriage.
Born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1959, Lockhart became the 20th conductor of the venerable Boston Pops in 1995. He was 35 years old at the time and succeeded John Williams and Arthur Fiedler in the post. According to most sources, he was the youngest conductor to hold such a position. In 1998, he became the conductor of the Utah Symphony; a position he holds in tandem with his Pops duties. The Brevard Music Center appointed Artistic Advisor of their summer institute in 2007. Lockhart's televised concert of "Fiddlers Three" with the Boston Pops won the 2002 Emmy Award and he was the recipient of the Bob Hope Patriot Award for encouraging love of country, service to the people of the Unites States of Support of America's Armed Services in 2006. All of this makes Keith Lockhart not only a recognizable figure on America's music scene, but a very busy man as well.
When apprised of the fact that when Marin Mazzie was interviewed by this writer, she stated "Keith Lockhart is one of the biggest musical theater geeks I know," the conductor responded with a hearty laugh. "That was very sweet of her. I'll take it as a compliment!! I've basically been in love with musical theater since I was a kid growing up in New York. I'd save my quarters so I could go down and see what was at the TKTS Booth. In the early part of my career, after finishing my grad work in Pittsburgh, the symphonic world was not calling particularly frequently, so most of my professional work for the first decade or so was doing musical theater. I did liaison faculty work with the drama department of Carnegie-Mellon, which is one of the biggest providers of Broadway talent. The first show I did there starred a kid with a kick-over-his-head named Rob Marshall. Rob and I have known each other since 1981. He was finishing his undergrad-work there at the point when I came in to do my grad work. My time at Carnegie-Mellon closed by doing a show at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1990 right before I went to Cincinnati and began the more symphonic experience. The show ran for the whole summer and I was the musical director. By then Rob Marshall was finishing his dance career on Broadway and was choreographing the production. So I got to do very high level productions of Sunday in the Park With George, Sweeney, and Candide. We also did some workshops and things like that. Plus, a lot of my students went on and are now working on Broadway and other aspects of the theater. I guess I really am a musical theater geek."
Under Lockhart's baton, the Boston Pops has recorded CD's of Glenn Miller's music, works of Richard Rodgers, Celtic music, Spanish tangos, two separate discs of American music and a couple of very popular Christmas collections. What made the maestro decide to do an album of Broadway and film music? "Well, we were looking for an attractive container for great American music. We thought that the two resources that are richest and most uniquely American are the music written for the soundstage in Hollywood and the music written for the Broadway stage. Then we basically set it off by naming our favorites. The result of that was about 150 hours long. To narrow it down we decided to look to the Oscars and the Tonys and trim it down by considering just the best of the best. We only recorded music from shows that won 'Best Musical' and only recorded music from movies that have won both 'Best Picture' and 'Best Score'. That narrowed it down a little bit but there were still tons of tough choices. My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music are the only two musicals that won both 'Best Musical' and 'Best Motion Picture'. They did it in consecutive years in '64 and '65. It was a great time for the Hollywood adaptation of the Broadway musical. There are all sorts of ones that you would think would have; for instance West Side Story didn't win 'Best Musical'. It won 'Best Motion Picture'. And the same was true with Chicago. What we ended up with is an album of where something on the disc is just about everybody's favorite."
