Latest news with #Pops
Boston Globe
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
July 4th Boston Pops Fireworks performer lineup announced
The free concert will include a slew of patriotic favorites – performed by the Pops, of course – closing with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. The fireworks display over the Charles will begin at about 9:40 p.m. The performance will be broadcast nationally on The CW Network and locally on WHDH-TV (Channel 7.) Advertisement Mark Shanahan can be reached at
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
Simple Summer Snacks
Sweet, easy recipes to solve warm-weather hunger MISSION, Kan., May 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- (Family Features) From lazy days by the pool to weekend road trips and everything in between, summer is packed with adventures. To keep your energy high for all those warm-weather activities, you'll need to keep sweet, delicious snacks on the family menu. Make sure versatile, flavorful watermelon is always on your grocery list so you can enjoy it for breakfast, lunch, snacks, desserts, drinks and beyond. It easily fits your existing routines for morning smoothies and snacking on the go, or in make-ahead dishes you can serve when hunger strikes. It's easy to cool off quickly on hot summer days with Watermelon Ice Pops, a simple, kid-friendly favorite made with watermelon and chunks of fresh fruit. Bursting with flavor, these frozen treats make snack time a cinch while tackling cravings, boosting hydration and supporting wellness in place of added-sugar treats. For a light afternoon bite before the dinner bell rings, try this Watermelon Salad with Feta and Mint that offers sweet summer flavor without the hassle. Pairing long-time favorites in feta cheese and mint, it's a classic for a reason with delicious watermelon adding nutritional content. Of course, as a kitchen staple to keep on hand throughout the year, watermelon is also perfect for enjoying all on its own at home or on the go. Whether it's diced, sliced, balled or blended, you can toss it in a jar for a healthy, hydrating snack. Cutting watermelon into convenient chunks is fast and easy so you can eat at home or toss in a to-go container to take to the office, beach or soccer practice. Just cut a grid pattern on the fruit and cubes will tumble out, ready to eat. Don't forget to wash and dry the rind on the watermelon before cutting. Cut the whole watermelon lengthwise into quarters. Lay each quarter on its rind with the interior facing up. Place the knife about 3/4 inch down from the peak of the wedge. Holding the knife parallel to the far side of the fruit and starting at the edge of the rind, cut a horizontal line across the fruit all the way down to the rind. Place the knife blade about 3/4 inch lower and make the same cut. Repeat. Turn the fruit to the other side and make the same horizontal cuts. Starting at the end of the rind, make vertical cuts straight down the rind, 3/4 inch apart all the way across. Remove the cubes and serve or store in an airtight container in the refrigerator. To find more ways to serve watermelon this summer and all year long, visit Watermelon Ice Pops Recipe courtesy of National Watermelon Promotion Board 1 watermelon chunks of fresh fruit (such as grapes, strawberries or kiwi) Puree watermelon and pour into ice pop molds. Drop in chunks of fresh fruit, insert caps and place in freezer. Serve when frozen. Watermelon Salad with Feta and Mint Recipe courtesy of National Watermelon Promotion Board 1/4 cup lemon vinaigrette 4 cups cubed watermelon 1/2 English cucumber, cut into 1/4-inch half moons 1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced 1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese 2 tablespoons fresh mint, roughly chopped Drizzle vinaigrette in bottom of large canning jar. Layer with watermelon, cucumber, red onion, feta and mint. Cover tightly with lid and shake to combine. Keep refrigerated until ready to serve. Substitution: Use Greek dressing in place of lemon vinaigrette. Michael Frenchmfrench@ About Family Features Editorial SyndicateA leading source for high-quality food, lifestyle and home and garden content, Family Features provides readers with topically and seasonally relevant tips, takeaways, information, recipes, videos, infographics and more. Find additional articles and information at and View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Family Features Editorial Syndicate Sign in to access your portfolio
CBS News
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Keith Lockhart celebrates 30 years as Boston Pops conductor with a big season ahead
Keith Lockhart is celebrating his 30th anniversary with the Boston Pops and looking ahead to what this season will bring. Three decades ago this week, Lockhart was first introduced as the Pops' new conductor. In the years that followed, he has become synonymous with the city, putting his own stamp on the 140-year-old institution. "If I had one word for my 35-year-old self, I'd say relax," Lockhart told WBZ-TV. 30 years with the Boston Pops Principal bassist Larry Wolfe thinks Lockhart was born to fill the role. "He had some very serious shoes to fill with Arthur Fiedler and then John Williams," said Wolfe. "And he did so beautifully, gracefully. He can do anything. He walks onstage, he'll pick up the baton and begin to conduct as if he's been doing it for an hour before. It's just, it's that natural and that fluid." The beloved conductor doesn't feel like this time with the Pops started that way. "It's one of those things that they give you a lot of responsibility and visibility that you never had and you want very much not to fail," said Lockhart. "I remember the first five to 10 years I was here as being believes in its cultural institutions the same way it believes in its sports teams. That can always cut a little both ways because that also means they demand a lot out of them, but by and large, you really feel supported by the entire community when you're here." Principal bassoonist Josh Baker is new to the Pops this season. He said Lockhart made an immediate impact on him. "I did go sub as an undergrad student, he would come up and say hello to me," said Baker. "And I think those little acts of kindness and consideration and attention when you are young and impressionable create a warm atmosphere and it's something that you do remember." Lockhart said of his more than 2,500 Pops performances, some do stand out like, "appearing onstage in the middle of the field at the Superdome in February of 2002 when the Patriots began the dynasty. [That] was pretty exciting." Pops musicians know how lucky they are to have Lockhart leading the orchestra. "I think it's one of those things that's not just ingrained in the culture here in Boston but in America, everyone knows what it is," said Baker. "And I think that's a testament to the power of what this organization has done." "I'll remember him always for the professionalism, the honesty, the clarity," said Wolfe. "Just can't say enough about him." Cynthia Erivo and "Jaws" Kicking off his 30th season with the baton is a sold-out concert featuring Cynthia Erivo. "She is just a stunning performer and has recently jumped into a real high degree of visibility, which we're thrilled by," said Lockhart. "It's going to be my first time working with her." Also on tap this spring is "Jaws" in concert and the Fidelity Investments Young Artists Competition, where four high school students get to perform with the Pops. "It's a great experience for them," said Lockhart. "It's a very exciting day to be in the audience too because these kids are so enthusiastic and so good." Cody Fry will perform that same night. Lockhart said Fry, "really has fascinating approaches and ways to think about orchestral music, which is not the usual thing you say about a huge internet sensation. And I think it's the beginning of a really, really cool relationship." What's next for Lockhart? So what does the future hold for the maestro? "I would say what's next for me after 30 years in this job in the short term is 31 years in this job," said Lockhart. "And obviously I won't be here forever, but in the time I am here, I'm going to try to continue to push the ball forward and try to do what I think the Pops does best, which is connect people to great music and connect people to each other."
New York Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Conductor Who Has the Ear of Red Sox and Classical Fans Alike
It's hard to fathom what the Boston Pops gets itself into with its annual Holiday Pops marathon, which takes up most of December at Symphony Hall. Last year, this orchestra played essentially the same program, with a few tweaks for family shows, 42 times in a bit less than three weeks. Santa Claus attended every concert. Boston audiences have come to expect that certain items will appear on the bill: Leroy Anderson's 'Sleigh Ride,' for example, and a dramatic reading of Clement Clarke Moore's 'A Visit From St. Nicholas.' The best of them, at least for wit, is David Chase's monstrously inventive arrangement of 'The 12 Days of Christmas,' which quotes Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, 'Oklahoma!' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' Sung with gusto, usually by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, it surprises every time you hear it. Then again, the whole Holiday Pops enterprise is something of a surprise. In the performances last December, the musicians of the Pops — essentially the Boston Symphony Orchestra without most of its principals — never seemed to look bored, and some had enough ho, ho, ho in them to wear a seasonal hat or even dance onstage. Musical standards remained admirably high. At the center of it all is Keith Lockhart, who is marking 30 years with the Pops this season. Hosting and conducting almost all of the dates in December, he often led three a day, sometimes following a pair of gigs at Symphony Hall with an evening concert at the helm of the freelance Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, in places as far afield as New Hampshire or Connecticut. You would never know from seeing him kick a cancan in 'The 12 Days of Christmas' that he has conducted 'Sleigh Ride' more than 850 times, or that he is 65. Surviving this startling display of podium endurance with regular naps, he shows little sign of flagging. The Pops offers a December and a spring season, this year beginning on May 8, plus a smattering of Tanglewood concerts and its annual July 4 celebration, played by the Esplanade Orchestra before hordes thronging Boston's Hatch Shell. During Lockhart's tenure, Holiday Pops has become the centerpiece of the calendar. Created in 1973, the revels grew gradually under his predecessors, Arthur Fiedler and John Williams, but have since come to rival Boston Ballet's 'Nutcracker' for sprawl: They sell about 90,000 seats, equivalent to roughly 70 percent of the tickets that the Boston Symphony sells in its entire regular concert season. Factor in food and drink receipts, and this is the kind of thing that it's easy to think cynically about. But that is not what is going on, or at least not only what is going on. Lockhart gives an eloquent speech, or three, on the meaning of the holiday season in a fractured world. He makes sure there is always new music, most recently 'Carol of the Brown King,' a David Coleman setting of Nativity poems by Langston Hughes. Nobody makes him include 'L'Adorazione dei Magi,' a decidedly obscure work by Respighi, but it's his favorite piece of holiday music, so he does it every few years anyway. Even Chad Smith, the avowed progressive who serves as president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony, admires 'the beautiful, quiet subversiveness of the way that Keith programs it.' For many in Boston, attending Holiday Pops is a tradition; Lockhart sees it serving the same role that church once did. 'I try to make the concert not just play 'All I Want For Christmas,' but have some spiritual significance to it, something that ties it together,' he said. 'In other words,' he added, 'not just crassly commercial.' At one concert near the end of the run last year, Lockhart conducted the crowd in a Joe Reisman medley, 'A Merry Little Sing-Along.' Phone flashlights soon appeared, hundreds of them, swaying in the dark. By some weird magic, it wasn't cringe-worthy but enchanting. THE BOSTON POPS has spent 140 years figuring out how to offer popular entertainment that is artistically meaningful, with an orchestra of quality at its heart. Other dedicated Pops orchestras are still around, not least the Cincinnati Pops, and every major orchestra gives pops concerts in one form or another. The Boston outfit still dominates the field. Lockhart is its inescapable face, and recently extended his contract through 2027. He has drawn more than his fair share of flack over the years: He came to the job young, quickly became a local celebrity, and is presiding at a time when it has proved impossible for the Pops to maintain the imperious position in American popular culture built by Fiedler from 1930 to his death in 1979, when he was eulogized as 'the maestro of the masses.' But Lockhart remains a crucial, beloved figure for the Boston Symphony, most of whose players he conducts far more often than their music director. And he has the experience and skills of a proper musician: He led the Utah Symphony for 11 years and has been artistic director of the Brevard Music Center Summer Institute and Festival since 2007. 'He comes in knowing what he's going to do, and we just follow him,' said Suzanne Nelsen, a Pops bassoonist. His collaborators are similarly effusive. 'Keith and the musicians, they know where the beat is,' said Branford Marsalis, the jazz saxophonist, 'so it never feels like it falls into affectation or stereotype, which are the worst experiences ever.' Ben Folds, the singer-songwriter, applauded the Pops for keeping the dignified environment of a symphony orchestra intact. 'When you're playing with Keith,' he said, 'he's taking the inside of your music seriously.' Bernadette Peters, Broadway royalty, confided that on her phone, she keeps a secret recording of the Pops performing a lullaby she wrote about a dog. 'He gets all these players to play as a whole, and make music with me,' she said of Lockhart. 'It's basically a miracle.' Lockhart is also one of the few conductors today who is deeply rooted in his community, so much so that even its baseball team speaks highly of him. Alex Cora, the manager of the Boston Red Sox, appeared at the Holiday Pops in 2018, and last year invited Lockhart to talk to his players at spring training. 'It was good for our guys, especially seeing it from a different perspective,' Cora said. 'Probably for them, it was like: 'Oh, he's a conductor, what is it, what's the big thing? He's just, you know, moving his hands and whatever.' No, no, no, no, he's doing a lot from that platform. It was good to have him around.' WHEN LOCKHART TOOK OVER the Pops, it was still recognizably the institution that Fiedler had made famous. Henry Higginson, who founded the Boston Symphony in 1881, created a series of spring Promenade Concerts four years later, offering overtures, waltzes, marches and so on. It was a populist enterprise from the start; the scholar Ayden Adler has noted that the public called the concerts 'Pops' long before the Symphony adopted the brand. Symphony Hall, finished in 1900, was designed to serve both, with rows of seats that could be replaced with tables. Over time, the blurry line between 'classical' and 'popular' concerts became clearer, leaving the Pops free to chase commercial success, though not at the expense of musical values; only at the end of Fiedler's concerts did he let loose with Broadway medleys or Beatles tunes. From 1980 to 1993, Williams, his successor, took the Pops in new directions, above all in film music, but left the format much as he found it. 'My 45-year association with this brilliant ensemble continues to be one of the great joys of my musical life,' he said in an email. Lockhart has kept the Pops standing even as many of the pillars on which it was built have crumbled. If anything beyond dropping Old Glory in 'The Stars and Stripes Forever' made the Pops 'America's Orchestra,' as Lockhart called it early on, it was television. But PBS ended 35 years of 'Evening at Pops' broadcasts in 2005, and the July 4 concert more recently met a similar fate. Fiedler was one of the great studio artists of his era, selling 50 million records, and Williams shipped plenty of his own; Lockhart has made some, but he has not escaped the collapse of the classical recording industry. Subtler forces are at work, too. Classical music has moved further from the mainstream, so finding an audience that knows the lighter repertoire that the Pops made its own has become impossible on the scale it once did. Entertainment has been repackaged: Fiedler's Pops barely announced its programs in advance, but Lockhart's is driven by guest artists, thematic concerts and film screenings. Even the way that the Pops sells tickets has changed tellingly. 'One of the secrets of the Pops' success was building ticket sales on a wholesale, not retail, model,' the former Symphony general manager Thomas W. Morris recently wrote. For decades after the 1930s, the Pops sold tickets primarily to groups rather than individuals, to the alumni associations and Rotary clubs that helped knit the ensemble into the fabric of community life. Going to the Pops was an inherently social affair; now, though, we bowl alone. Group sales peaked at 90 percent and remained near 80 percent in the 1980s. They accounted for 16 percent of Holiday Pops tickets last year. 'It's not just cultural consumption, it's sociological,' Lockhart said of the transformation of the Pops. 'It's the way people interact with each other.' CAN THE POPS retain its place in American musical culture? The question is most urgent outside the festive season, when there is less of a hook for audiences to grab hold of. Holiday Pops sold at 87 percent of capacity last year, but Spring Pops languished at 69 percent. Projections look more promising for the coming season, which includes a night with Cynthia Erivo; a cosmic program starring the astronaut Suni Williams and George Takei of 'Star Trek' fame; and 'Jaws' and 'Frozen' with live soundtracks. 'Sometimes Pops feels a little bit like a genre without an identity,' Smith said. 'The identity of Pops has to be contemporary. It has to be urgent. It has to be trying to be on the bleeding edge, but recognizing that it is a populist art form.' Charting a future for the Pops is crucial for the Symphony broadly; it brings in roughly half the revenue that the organization earns from its orchestral concerts. Pops concerts are starting to spread across the calendar, and Smith said that it is finding more ways to serve the city, pointing to a Day of the Dead concert last November and an annual Pride celebration. Whatever the Pops plays, and whomever it plays with, Lockhart wants to make sure that it adheres to at least one of its founding theories. 'We've always insisted that the orchestra, at some level, remain the star of its show,' he said. 'We want to make sure the audience realizes we're there.'
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Yahoo
Harrowing footage shows the moment trailblazing NYC bodega-owning grandma was shot dead in crossfire
Heart-pounding footage shows the moment a beloved former Harlem bodega owner was fatally caught in a hail of bullets Tuesday night after she heard gunshots and rushed outside to check on her grandson. Excenia Mette, 61, was shot in the head by a bullet intended for someone else and was later pronounced dead at an area hospital, according to police and law enforcement sources. Surveillance footage from a nearby business shows Mette stepping outside Tamara's Beauty Bar — a salon on the first floor of her apartment building — around 10:30 p.m., looking around and then trying to retreat back inside as more gunfire erupted — but failing to make it in time. Instead, the cherished community member crumpled to the ground in the heartbreaking video obtained by The Post. The shooting that claimed the life of the innocent bystander and wounded another victim started when an argument between two men escalated into a gun battle. One suspect pulled a gun first, leading to a brief struggle, sources said. The second suspect then brandished his own gun and opened fire — with one of his shots hitting Mette, according to sources. The 47-second clip shows other bystanders scurrying to safety behind parked cars after the sound of two gunshots initially went off, while Mette poked her head outside the salon at West 113th Street and Lenox Avenue. She then walked a few steps further outside and appeared to shout something before another series of gunshots went off, the video shows. The grandmother was struck and fell onto the sidewalk in front of the salon's door as she attempted to run back inside to safety. Another man then emerged on the security video and took a tumble before quickly getting to his feet and ducking for cover, the harrowing video shows. Mette, who was affectionately known as 'Zeenie,' was left lying on the ground for several seconds before anyone rushed to check on her, according to the clip. At least eight shell casings were recovered at the scene during the police probe. Loved ones told The Post it was within Mette's character to rush outside to make sure her grandson was safe, even if it led to her tragic death. Nearly 24 hours after the fatal shooting, a makeshift memorial was set up with flowers and prayer candles that spelled out the letter Z and a heart shape outside the beauty salon. A large piece of cardboard was hung on the front of the salon, which was closed on Wednesday, with several heartfelt, hand-written messages praising and remembering Mette. 'We love your soul, Momma Zee,' one message read. 'Fly high, my love.' 'You taught me how to be a gentleman, without a Pops,' another read. 'I miss you so much already,' a third tragically said. Mette became a pillar in her Harlem community as the former owner of Momma Zee's Food to Plez Deli, which she ran for around four decades. She opened up her trailblazing business in the 1980s, making it the first woman- and black-owned bodega in the Big Apple. The deli closed after it couldn't survive the COVID-19 pandemic. One suspect allegedly involved in the gun fight, Darious Smith, 23, was taken into custody by authorities. He suffered a gunshot wound to the foot. The second gunman, who is responsible for killing Mette, remains on the lam Wednesday night.
