Reviews of Lance's Tanglewood Festival Chorus Performances

POPS KICKS OFF THE HOLIDAY SEASON

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff Date: 12/11/1999 Page: F1 Section: Arts

Holiday Pops is a recent tradition, as traditions go, but an exceedingly popular one - the season has now expanded to 32 concerts in Symphony Hall, not to mention a national tour just concluded.

Later concerts will certainly go more smoothly than some of opening night did - a jaunty arrangement by Patrick Hollenbeck of Jose Feliciano's hit "Feliz Navidad" nearly split apart at the seams and even the Pops' shopworn arrangement of "White Christmas" found the Tanglewood Festival Chorus unsure about where to stand up, causing a bit of merriment in the audience. Frankly the management owes it to the large, devoted public for these concerts to assure that there is time to prepare them adequately, even if the public is in the mood for a good time and inclined to be generous. One was left again with the impression that the Boston Symphony management is a little careless about dragging its cash cow into Bethlehem's stable.

The Holiday Pops have always been a mixture of the sophisticated and the homely, sometimes more appealing than others. In his early seasons, Keith Lockhart more or less went with the flow, but this year he seems to have taken a more active hand in making the program at once more artistically satisfying and more fun. There were several effective new arrangements, but there's room for one more next year - the audience got to sing along for "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," but there needs to be a new, tasteful arrangement of the traditional religious carols for sing-along too. The audience was simply left out of the serious part of the program.

This year the first half included holiday music by Bach, Bizet, Ives, and Vaughan Williams, along with John Rutter's arrangement of "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and the "Fantasy on Christmas Carols" by the British composer Malcolm Arnold in an arrangement by Christopher Palmer - leading to the amusing program credit Arnold-Palmer. Lockhart also restored a treat from the John Williams era, the pretty little carols by the Hollywood composer Alfred Burt. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus took an especially active role in all of this, singing with a nice mixture of enthusiasm and balance.

The second half, energetically led by Lockhart sporting a shiny red vest and tie under his Armani jacket, was mostly pop music, although the inclusion of two movements from Duke Ellington's arrangement of "The Nutcracker" ("Sugar-Rum Cherry" and "Peanut Brittle Brigade") was a classy touch, and this brought forth some especially spirited playing from the Esplanade Orchestra and an uncredited saxophonist (there was no personnel list in the program book, an unforgivable omission). Lockhart's first recording was a Christmas record with Mel Torme, and he honored his late collaborator by playing a new arrangement of "The Christmas Song" that featured a suave solo by concertmaster Joseph Scheer. Another newcomer was Danny Troob's delightful development of Albert Hague's songs for "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" into a through-composed piece with narrator, like "Peter and the Wolf"; the America Repertory Theatre's Will LeBow read Dr. Seuss's verses with spiteful relish.

A mystery guest, Mr. S. Claus, arrived and worried that Rudolph's nose might not be Y2K compliant, and then pondered various possibilities for forthcoming newspaper headlines ("Pikachu Running for Senator in New York"; "Big Dig Ahead of Schedule and Below Budget"; and "Pops Elected America's Orchestra in a Landslide"). Mr. Claus chose the third, and no wonder.