“Welcome to the 138th season of the Boston Pops,” said Keith Lockhart shortly into Saturday’s concert, following it with, “Welcome to the first Pride Night.” The juxtaposition of those two declarations was as stark as it was intentional. Here was the conductor of America’s Orchestra calling attention to how overdue the occasion was.
But at long last, a program celebrating the LGBTQ+ community’s musical contributions had been added to the Pops’ repertoire of theme nights, and night one of Pride Month, no less. As Lockhart crossed the Symphony Hall stage to his podium, he gave his shoulders a couple of little pumps, as if saying, “Here we go!” WGBH executive arts editor Jared Bowen cohosted the evening, as Lockhart led the Pops through a selection of pieces by queer composers. The playful, darting flutes of the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” gave way to sweeping strings and twittering woodwinds, shifting from pastoral to galloping, while Tchaikovsky’s stately “The Garland Waltz” from The Sleeping Beauty featured a busy topline of violins over insistent string stabs.
Advertisement Riven with stillness, trans composer Angela Morley’s arrangement of Stephen Sondheim’s “No One Is Alone” offered a twilight drift with soft brass hums in a song about community coming together. Peter Maxwell Davies’s “An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise” was more outright jubilant, with explicitly Celtic influences increasingly asserting themselves u.
