"We know Keith Lockhart first and foremost as the Boston Pops," says Deborah Card, president of the Chicago Symphony. "If he wants to be able to do both, he's going to have to work harder at branding himself at both."

Card has never seen Lockhart do "Tosca," which he conducted for Boston Lyric Opera last year. She has also never heard him in Salt Lake City, where Lockhart leads the Utah Symphony in works he can't do in Boston. When he conducts Mahler — he recently did Symphony No. 2 in Utah — his work week is not measurably different than Levine's in Symphony Hall.

The financial rewards in Salt Lake City are less than those in Boston. He makes $245,000 a year, less than half of his Pops salary, which was $608,837 in the most recent year available. In Utah, though, he doesn't have to chat up the crowd. He needn't maintain a tattooed smile while conducting Three Dog Night's "Shambala." He can get four rehearsals for one program, not the single run-through allowed for each Pops series.

"Being music director of a traditional symphonic ensemble is like being executive chef in a great restaurant," Lockhart says. "You work on process, on presentation, you work on fine points of cuisine. Being conductor of the Boston Pops is more like being a really, really good short-order cook."

What the two jobs share with the rest of the orchestra world is the struggle to expand the audience. Nationally, symphony ticket sales have been down roughly 10 percent since 2000. The Pops have not been immune. For most of his tenure, Lockhart kept Symphony Hall, on average, at 92 percent capacity. Last year, that fell to 88 percent. (The latter figure is the same for Levine's ticket sales during his just-completed first year.)

In Utah, though, attendance has dropped from a high of 75,000 in 2000 to about 65,000. On an average night, the hall is just over 70 percent full. Empty seats have been coupled with a controversial merger of the symphony and Utah Opera, and the new organization has lost about $3.4 million in the past two years.

Lockhart also found himself battered during a contract negotiation, with players growing angry for what they said was a lack of support from their music director. Lockhart has heard the complaints, he says, sipping a smoothie in the den of his sparsely decorated home in Salt Lake City.

The players don't understand, Lockhart says. They wanted some kind of public show of support. Instead, he worked behind closed doors to persuade bean-counting board members not to reduce salaries and cut players.

If he made a mistake, Lockhart says, it was in trying at all.