Boston Pops 4th of July Show Moving to Tanglewood Venue in Western Mass
The annual Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular is back this year, but in a different way.
The 2020 event was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced last week that this year’s Boston Pops July Spectacular concert will take place at Tanglewood music venue in western Massachusetts instead of on the Esplanade. It will also broadcast live on Bloomberg TV and WHDH. The audience will be capped at 9,000 or 50 percent capacity. The fireworks finale, however, will still take place in Boston, but from the Boston Common instead of from the Charles River. The Tanglewood concert will not feature any fireworks and there will not be any concert stream or sound on the Common.
The 4th of July concert and fireworks usually requires a nearly 10-month planning process involving multiple government agencies and private organizations, which is the reason it was not feasible this year. “Though health concerns related to the pandemic have abated over the last few weeks, after careful consideration we determined there wasn’t enough time to organize the many forces needed to safely return to the Esplanade and present what is considered one of the largest concert events in the world,” Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart said in a statement. “We decided that it just wasn’t advisable to squeeze what is normally a 10-month planning period into a five-week window,” Lockhart added.
Free tickets will become available on the Boston Sympthony Orchestra’s website on first-come, first-served basis, with a four-ticket per household limit, on June 21 at 10 a.m. BSO officials stated that they plan to bring the concert back to the Hatch Memorial Shell on the Esplanade in 2022.
