Boston Pops Conductor Keith Lockhart, right, leads the Boston Pops and singer Marc Martel in music by Queen in a 2024 concert. Photo by Hilary Scott/Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In Tuesday’s (12/22) WBGH (Boston), Kate Dellis and Edgar B. Herwick III write, “The United States’ National Recording Registry [is] a list of more than 600 recordings that have been deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant by the Library of Congress. In this edition GBH’s ‘The Culture Show,’ Keith Lockhart with the acclaimed orchestra Boston Pops waxes operatic about his love of Queen’s 1975 masterpiece ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ ‘Twenty-five years ago, there were all these things that everybody knew how to sing,’ Lockhart said. ‘These days, our audience is fragmented enough … that there’s only one song I can think of that pretty much everybody in every audience we ever play for knows. And that is “Bohemian Rhapsody.”… The track became Queen’s first top-10 hit in the United States and their first No. 1 hit in the United Kingdom…. On its initial release in 1975, millions of people across the globe bought the record. One of those buyers was a gifted 15-year-old clarinetist in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. That, of course, was Keith Lockhart. ‘The first rock album I bought—the first LP I bought—was ‘Night at the Opera’ in the fall of 1975,’ Lockhart said. ‘I’d heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” in airplay on the radio, and I thought, How did they do this?’ ”
