The POPSearch process
Singers may audition for POPSearch 2007 in any one of three ways: by posting a two-minute performance video on YouTube; by sending a two-minute audition video or by going to Symphony Hall to tape a live audition. On May 29, the top 16 POPSearch contestants selected by conductor Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops artistic staff will be announced, and their video auditions will be posted online on the POPSearch YouTube site. From May 29 to June 28, music lovers from across the country will be invited to vote for their favorite POPSearch contestants at www.bostonpops.org. Online voting results will be combined with votes from Keith Lockhart, a panel of judges, members of the Boston Pops, and the Symphony Hall audience at a special POPSearch concerts hosted by Keith Lockhart, where the contestants will perform with the Boston Pops rhythm section.
YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.
Symphony Hall is a concert hall located at 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. Designed by McKim, Mead and White, it was built in 1900 for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which continues to make the hall its home. The hall was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1999 and is a pending Boston Landmark. It was then noted that "Symphony Hall remains, acoustically, among the top three concert halls in the world ... and is considered the finest in the United States." Symphony Hall, located one block from Berklee College of Music to the north and one block from the New England Conservatory to the south, also serves as home to the Boston Pops Orchestra as well as the site of many concerts of the Handel and Haydn Society.
Keith Alan Lockhart is an American conductor. He is currently the Conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Chief Guest Conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra, and the Artistic Director of the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina.
The final round of POPSearch will take place during the June 28 Boston Pops concert at Symphony Hall, when the three finalists will perform with the entire orchestra for the first time in the competition. Online votes and live voting at Symphony Hall will be combined to determine the POPSearch 2007 winner. The POPSearch 2007 grand champion wins $5,000 and the opportunity to perform with the Boston Pops on July 3 and 4 in the annual July 4 Extravaganza seen by a live audience of almost a half-million people on the Charles River Esplanade and several million more on WBZ-TV.
Past POPSearch Winners
Tracy Silva, a mother of two from Taunton, Mass., and van driver for special-needs children, won the inaugural POPSearch contest in 2004, wowing judges with her soulful rendition of "Fools Fall in Love" from the hit Broadway musical Smokey Joe's Cafe. She beat out more than 700 contestants from across New England for the chance to perform "Your Daddy's Son" from the musical Ragtime with Mr. Lockhart and the Boston Pops at the orchestra's marquis event: the annual July 4 Extravaganza. Ms. Silva has since sung with the Pops as a guest soloist three times in 2005 and 2006, in addition to performances at Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots games, at the Democratic National Convention, and as the opening act for Broadway star Maureen McGovern.
Frances Botelho-Hoeg, an elementary school principal from Kingston, Mass., was knocked out in the second round of the inaugural POPSearch, but returned in 2005 to sweep the competition by singing "When You're Good to Mama" from the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Chicago. Ms. Botelho-Hoeg performed with the Pops on July 4 and traveled with America's Orchestra that summer on a national tour that included stops in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Ms. Botelho-Hoeg has since performed with the Plymouth Symphony and at such local events as Bunker Hill Community College's commencement.
Finalists in 2004 and 2005 included Wayne Hobbs, a bank vice-president from Vergennes, Vt. (2004); Ellen O'Brien, a sales representative from Winthrop, Mass. (2005); Kathy Porter, a marketing manager and grandmother from Braintree, Mass. (2004); and Joseph Rucker Jr., a social worker from Brockton, Mass. (2005).
The Boston Pops Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts that specializes in playing light classical and popular music.
Jodi Marie Marzorati Benson is an American actress, voice actress and singer. She is best known for providing both the speaking and the singing voice of Disney's Princess Ariel in The Little Mermaid and its sequel, prequel, and television series spinoff. Benson voiced the character Barbie in the 1999 Golden Globe-winning movie Toy Story 2 and its 2010 Academy Award-winning sequel Toy Story 3. She also voiced Barbie in the Toy Story cartoon Hawaiian Vacation. For her contributions to the Disney company, Benson was named a Disney Legend in 2011.
Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is currently music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and artistic director of the New World Symphony, an American orchestral academy based in Miami Beach, Florida.
The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, directed by James Burton, is a chorus which performs with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops in major choral works. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus (TFC) was organized in the spring of 1970, when founding conductor John Oliver became director of vocal and choral activities at the Tanglewood Music Center, the summer home of the BSO. Originally formed for performances at the BSO's summer home at the behest of the BSO's conductor designate Seiji Ozawa, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus is the official chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops Orchestra year-round, performing in Boston, New York and Tanglewood.
Anthony Cosmo Callea is an Australian singer-songwriter and stage actor who rose to prominence as the runner-up in the 2004 season of Australian Idol. Callea's debut single, a cover of Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli's song "The Prayer" is the fastest-selling single by an Australian artist, held the No.1 spot on the ARIA Singles Chart for five weeks, a record for the debut single of an Australian Idol contestant, and was the second-highest selling Australian single of the last decade.
Sandra Faye "Sandi" Patty is an American Christian music singer, known for her wide vocal range and expressive flexibility which has led music critics to dub her "The Voice".
sThe New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts, founded in 1995, is a 75-member mostly non-professional regional orchestra based in Newton, Massachusetts. The "New Phil" performs in at the First Baptist Church in Newton (Massachusetts), and on occasion at Mission Church in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, as well as other locations in the region.
Evening at Pops was an American concert television series produced by WGBH-TV. It is one of the longest-running programs on PBS, airing from 1970 to 2005. The program was a public television version of a variety show, featuring performances by the Boston Pops Orchestra. It was taped at Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts.
Erich Kunzel, Jr. was an American orchestra conductor. Called the "Prince of Pops" by the Chicago Tribune, he performed with a number of leading pops and symphony orchestras, especially the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra (CPO), which he led for 32 years.
Fred Barton is an American composer, lyricist, director, actor, singer, arranger, conductor, and pianist who made his New York debut in 1982 as co-creator-arranger-performer-pianist in the original company of the long-running revue Forbidden Broadway, appearing in the New York, Los Angeles and Boston productions for 2,000 performances, and on the cast album for DRG Records. In 1985 the show won a Drama Desk Award. Forbidden Broadway ran for 27 years off-Broadway, and won a special Tony Award in 2006.
Harolyn Blackwell is an American lyric coloratura soprano who has performed in many of the world's finest opera houses, concert halls, and theaters in operas, oratorios, recitals, and Broadway musicals. Initially known for her work within musical theater during the early 1980s, Blackwell moved into the field of opera and by 1987 had established herself as an artist within the soubrette repertoire in many major opera houses both in the United States and in Europe. Feeling that she was being "type cast" into one particular kind of role, Blackwell strove to establish herself within the lyric coloratura repertoire beginning in the mid-1990s. With the aid of such companies as Seattle Opera, Blackwell successfully made this move and is now an interpreter of such roles as Lucia in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Olympia in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffman. She has also periodically returned to musical theater performances throughout her career in staged productions, concert work, and recitals. Blackwell is known for her interpretations and recordings of the works of Leonard Bernstein.
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra (YTSO) is an orchestra assembled by open auditions hosted by YouTube, the London Symphony Orchestra and several other worldwide partners. Launched on December 1, 2008, it is the first-ever online collaborative orchestra.
Ina Zdorovetchi is a Moldovan-born classical harpist. In 2009 USA granted her the colloquially known "Genius" Green Card: permanent residency under E-11 classification given to Aliens with Extraordinary Ability in the Arts normally awarded to the likes of famous artists, Nobel Prize winners and public figures such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Zdorovetchi received her American citizenship in 2015. She is the winner of the Seventeenth International Harp Contest in Israel - the most prestigious international harp competition in the world - having received the highest awarded prize (II), the special prize for the best performance of Chamber Music and the special prize for the best interpretation of the new music piece by Yitzhak Yedid.
Yuja Wang is a Chinese classical pianist. She was born in Beijing, began studying piano there at age six, and went on to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. By the age of 21 she was already an internationally recognized concert pianist, giving recitals around the world. She has a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. In an interview with the LA Times, she said “For me, playing music is about transporting to another way of life, another way of being. An actress does that.” Yuja Wang lives in New York City.
Charlie Albright is an American-born classical pianist, composer, and improviser. He is an official Steinway Artist, 2014 Avery Fisher Career Grant Recipient, 2010 Gilmore Young Artist (2010) and former Young Concert Artist. He graduated from Harvard College (B.A.) and the New England Conservatory (M.M.) as the first classical pianist in the schools' five-year BA/MM Joint Program, was named the Leverett House Artist in Residence for 2011–2012, and was one of the 15 Most Interesting Seniors of the Harvard College Class of 2011. He graduated from the Juilliard School of Music with his post-graduate Artist Diploma (A.D.) in 2014.
George Li is an American concert pianist who was a recipient of a Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2016 and silver medalist of the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition.
John Williams, also formerly credited as Johnny Williams, worked as a jazz pianist and studio musician before starting to compose for television and film. Throughout his career he has directed his own works whenever possible.
The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (BPYO) is the youth orchestra of the Boston Philharmonic and is considered the premier youth orchestra in the Boston area. Created in 2012, the tuition-free orchestra consists of musicians between the ages of 12-21. The BPYO performs an annual concert series in Boston as well as international tours and has released two commercial recordings. The founder and current conductor of the orchestra is Benjamin Zander.
Sons of Serendip is a classical crossover ensemble consisting of musicians Kendall Ramseur (cellist), Cordaro Rodriguez (pianist), Mason Morton (harpist), and Micah Christian. The quartet met in graduate school at Boston University, while completing degrees in Cello Performance (Ramseur), Law (Rodriguez), Harp Performance (Morton), and Theology (Christian). A year after finishing their graduate education, the group formed in 2014 specifically for the reality competition, America's Got Talent, where they finished in fourth place.
