Lockhart's baton — Symphony conductor reflects on his decade of high notes

Keith Lockhart is starting his 11th — and final — season as music director of the Utah Symphony this weekend with mixed feelings.

"I feel good with what I've done there," he told the Deseret News in a phone interview from Boston. "There are some things I would have liked to have done that I didn't, but I'm leaving with good feelings."

True to form since his first season in 1998-99, Lockhart opens and closes the season with a bang. Continuing the tradition of beginning a season with a piano concerto, perennial Utah Symphony favorite Garrick Ohlsson returns to Abravanel Hall this Friday and Saturday in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto.

Then the Utah Symphony Chorus joins Lockhart and the orchestra in Beethoven's monumental Ninth Symphony.

"Having an all-Beethoven concert is a season opener tradition with the Utah Symphony," Lockhart said. "And it's time we bring back the Ninth. The last time it was done was four years ago with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. And I did it eight years ago."

Lockhart closes the season May 29-30, 2009, with another work conceived on a grand scale, Leonard Bernstein's "Mass," commissioned for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1971. "I've been wanting to do Bernstein's 'Mass' for some time," Lockhart said. "It's a major work and a significant 20th century work."

The "Mass" was originally scheduled for last season, but the expense involved in presenting it forced Lockhart to cancel it at that time. But given the work's theatricality and Lockhart's penchant for 20th century American composers such as Bernstein, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, the "Mass" is a natural choice for his final concert with the Utah Symphony as its music director.

In between Beethoven's Ninth and Bernstein's "Mass," the new season will be peppered with large works that will be new to the symphony's repertoire. Among these are Bela Bartok's "The Miraculous Mandarin" and Charles Ives' Fourth Symphony.

"The Bartok is a great challenge for the orchestra, and I hope that the audience will think it's one of the season's highlights."

A definite high point will undoubtedly be Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony, not only because it's the last work completed by the Austrian composer but also because it closes Lockhart's Mahler cycle, which he began in his first season as music director.

"That will sew things up nicely," Lockhart said. "In our cycle, we did all of the orchestral works, including 'Das Lied von der Erde' and the first movement of his unfinished Tenth Symphony."