When people ask Keith Lockhart what he does for exercise, he has a ready answer for them: He conducts 140 concerts a year, plus regular three-hour rehearsals. For Lockhart, conducting the Utah Symphony or the Boston Pops is an aerobic activity, all deep knee bends, toe raises and violent arm movements. He's Jack La Lanne with a baton.
His style of conducting is so physical that the 42-year-old maestro actually has a torn rotator cuff, an injury more common to baseball pitchers. His physical therapist, who works with Olympic athletes, performs deep tissue massage on his shoulder a couple of days a week and tells him, "You have one of the most messed up shoulders I've ever dealt with."
"It's very similar to a pitching motion," says Lockhart of conducting. "Of course it's not as violent. But there are about 3,000 downbeats in one concert — there's some off speed, they're not all fast balls."
There are some mornings he wakes up with a sore shoulder. At other times his hand goes numb because of some impingement on the nerves in his shoulder. It would help if he weren't quite so passionate on the podium, but if he weren't so passionate he wouldn't be conducting two orchestras in the first place, or traveling almost non-stop coast to coast as a guest conductor and lecturer, or seeing his wife only about half the year.
A Boston TV station took note of his conducting style and put a heart monitor on him while he ran Heartbreak Hill of Boston Marathon fame and again while he conducted a Boston Pops concert.
"It was higher of course for Heartbreak Hill," Lockhart says, "but that was only for two miles, not for four hours" of conducting.
Lockhart is the boy wonder of the music world. In 1995, at the age of 35, he was named conductor of the Boston Pops, the world-famous orchestra that has blended orchestral music with pop for some 117 years. Compared to most conductors, he was a kid. About two years later he was named director of the Utah Symphony.
In Boston, he has attained a certain rock-star status. His face appears on T-shirts, coffee mugs, postcards, city buses, TV and radio shows. Women have been known to scream when he takes the stage. He is stopped for autographs on the street. Attendance soared to an all-time record when he took over the Pops. His often-noted charisma and youthful good looks — people tell him he reminds them of actor Hugh Grant — along with his position as conductor of the beloved Pops, have made him a popular figure in Boston.
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