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POPSEARCH 2004
Silva is Boston’s ‘Idol’
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
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"And the winner is ....," Keith Lockhart said as he wrestled with the envelope Tuesday night. The three finalists of POPSearch 2004 stood beside him clutching one another’s hands. Symphony Hall was sold out, and the crowd was hushed. " ... Tracy Silva!" Applause and whoops erupted like a herd of buffalo stampeding across the plains, but that rumble will pale in comparison with the cheers of half a million, which is about how many Silva will perform for with the Boston Pops and conductor Lockhart on the Esplanade — where she’ll share the stage with flamboyant former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth — this Fourth of July. The 36-year-old mother of two from Taunton who drives a van for special-needs children is the winner of the first ever POPSearch, the orchestra’s open talent contest that took its cue from the American Idol craze. "I’m excited, overjoyed! The whole thing has felt like a dream," Silva, who regularly performs in her church choir and her community theater, told the pack of reporters and cameramen after winning with a gospel-drenched performance of "Fools Fall in Love." from Smokey Joe’s Café. "I’ll be nervous, but it’ll be a different kind of nervous because I won’t be competing." And compete she did. The saga began on June 3 and 4 when 750 amateurs flocked to Symphony Hall for the cattle-call audition. Judges from Boston’s music community, with Lockhart’s input, narrowed the field to 16. A panel of celebrity judges chose nine semifinalists from that batch after a public performance in Copley Square. Then it was on to Symphony Hall, where three at a time sang over the course of three Pops concerts and the audience and orchestra cast ballots each night. Silva was selected over two other finalists by a trio of judges: Broadway legend Maureen McGovern; Tim Fox, president of Columbia Arts Management; and the first grand champ of Star Search, Sam Harris. As they left to deliberate, Fox said, "You’ve made our job very difficult." "Every one of the steps was very painful, and that’s a tribute to the level [of talent] we’ve gotten," Lockhart said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon. He described POPSearch as an experiment that "began with the idea that we would look and see who’s out there worthy of fulfilling their dream of singing with the Boston Pops." He knows full well how many have that dream: hundreds of people every year, he said, send him home videos of themselves singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." As for fellow finalists Kathy Porter, a Braintree marketing manager who sang "Maybe This Time," from Cabaret, and tenor Wayne Hobbs, a bank VP from Vermont who did "La donna è mobile," from Verdi’s Rigoletto, they went in knowing how tough the competition would be. But as Hobbs concluded, "I feel like all three of us have already won just by how far we’ve gotten."
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