Lockhart's lackluster leadership stilted symphony

With Keith Lockhart's departure last May after 11 seasons as music director of the Utah Symphony, and the search committee's take-it-slow approach to finding a replacement, the orchestra found itself in the unusual situation of opening the new season this weekend without a music director in place.

And with the start of the new season this is a good time to examine Lockhart's tenure with the orchestra.

Two questions need to be examined and answered. What is Lockhart's legacy here, and, is the Utah Symphony a better orchestra now than when Lockhart came?

Lockhart's legacy as music director rests mainly on two things: his Gustav Mahler cycle and the merger of the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera in 2002.

In an obvious attempt to connect with legendary music director Maurice Abravanel, Lockhart made it a point to conduct at least one Mahler symphony each season. While his performances of these works weren't always well conceived or executed — and fall short of the recordings the orchestra made of them under Abravanel in the 1960s and '70s — Lockhart did introduce a new generation of concertgoers to Mahler's symphonies and reintroduced many of them into the symphony's repertoire.

When the symphony and opera announced plans to merge, Lockhart was one of the most vocal proponents of the union, insisting that it was the right thing to do in order to ensure each company's future in a world in which arts organizations were finding it increasingly difficult to operate in the black.

Whether this would have been the case with the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera will never be known, since the report commissioned by the two was unabashedly slanted in favor of a merger.

In any case, it didn't hurt either company once the newness of it wore off and the two companies could go ahead and do what they did best — independently of each other as in pre-merger days.

Lockhart also took the orchestra on its first European tour in nearly two decades, and it made its first recording since Joseph Silverstein's time as music director.

Unfortunately, neither was highly successful and didn't result in follow-up tours or recordings.

Lockhart came to Salt Lake City in 1998 as Silverstein's successor with a major handicap. At the time he was the music director of the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra but better known as the conductor of the Boston Pops.

The symphonic repertoire was new to him as a conductor, so his firsthand experience with this music was rather limited. And, regrettably, he had a pops approach to many of the works in the standard repertoire.