For Peter Nero, music was a big tent, and the Philly Pops thrived

At the keyboard as in life, Peter Nero had an exquisite sense of timing. He came along in Philadelphia in the 1970s, and, with his curious blend of superb musicianship and programming hijinks, he quickly made the Philly Pops essential listening for a large slice of the city’s musical audience.

Nero died July 6 at age 89, and his exit at the moment of the Pops’ greatest peril should remind anyone who cares about the future of the group how it came to be ingrained in the city’s personality.

It boils down to a pianist and conductor who knew that for many, the capacity to love music was exceeded by their knowledge of it. All they needed was a friendly hand and a little showmanship.

And a great heap of fun. Who else could perform a Hanukkah medley that blended Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a Russian sailor’s dance, and the space-age pop music of Esquivel — and make it sound convincing?

America has produced a few great pops conductors and many fine jazz pianists. But it’s hard to think of any musician who was anything like Nero, whose long Philly Pops tenure ended a decade ago.

He trafficked in the cornball (Christmas as well as Hanukkah) and yet could be profound and expressive.

To him, all music existed on the same plane. There wasn’t a label that wasn’t worth ignoring, no genre that couldn’t be blended with another. He heard music as a plastic — to be colored, molded, and accessorized for the ever-changing tastes of the 20th-century consumer.

Nero was an artist who succeeded because he loved to be loved, and that meant reading the room, both inside the concert hall in real time and in the larger sense of understanding the direction of the marketplace.

Paying close attention to what people want is a practice many organizations have only recently adopted. In some ways, everything Nero was decades ago seems like the answer to what ails the concert hall today.

He understood the power of surprise, shunning printed programs in favor of talking through the program from the stage. His shows sparkled with humor, nostalgia, emotion, and invention.

At the core of it all was a magnificent pianist, virtuosic and imaginative. He liked to warm up before rehearsals with Chopin’s Etude No. 1 — a piece so difficult that Vladimir Horowitz wouldn’t play it in public — dropping the jaws of any musician who happened to be eavesdropping.

And then there was his playing in his own arrangement of “White Christmas” at a concert two decades ago in which this critic wrote that Nero’s playing was “more freewheeling and inventive than Ahmad Jamal’s, and in the same league of tastefulness as Marian McPartland in her prime.”

Who knows what drew him to certain pieces. But he had a gift for catching moments in time that, collectively, added up to a stylish account of music and culture over several distinct eras.

Philadelphians know Nero’s days here, and with good reason. Impresario Moe Septee founded the Philly Pops in 1979, and Nero was its public face from the start. He stayed on its podium for 34 years — a tenure that overlapped with six Philadelphia Orchestra musical leaders.

The Brooklyn-born Nero had a dozen other identities outside of Philadelphia. He played nightclubs and jazz joints, Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. His score provided the cool for the 1963 movie Sunday in New York with Jane Fonda. He embraced the 1970s in all of its groovy, bell-bottomed, smiley-faced splendor.

If you want to remember the early ‘70s, just pop on Nero’s recording of Summer of ‘42. It’s corny in the extreme and, if you’re willing to let the truth in, also extremely beautiful — the haunting harmonic changes, those Rachmaninoff-like piano runs, the soaring chorus at the climax, the lonely flute solo near the end. The album went gold.

In Philadelphia, his musically intrepid decades concretized into something truly magnificent: a fully formed personification of a musical organization. Although he was bitter after his split with the Philly Pops in 2013, his feelings for the city and the civic role he established for his ensemble never cooled.

“He had hoped to do a benefit concert for the Philly Pops and started to physically decline,” said his daughter, Beverly Nero. “His heart was totally there.”

Our hearts remain with him. We’ve got a lot to thank him for — the laughs, his view of music as a big tent, the deep emotional well he brought to jazz standards and his joy-riding through “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Thanks, especially, are due him for showing us that music evolves and institutions must evolve with it.

Nero liked to end his concerts with Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March” while leading the audience in a round of corresponding hand gestures. There’s no Philly Pops around right now to play the piece in his honor. But I’m quite sure that if you listen carefully, you can hear thousands across the region quietly humming its tune.