In the Boston Symphony Orchestra's first concert of the 2026 Tanglewood season, actor Alec Baldwin is the narrator in Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait. Two days before the July 5th performance, Baldwin talked with CRB's Brian McCreath about preparing to read Lincoln's words, their resonance for today's world, and his own deep love of classical - and especially orchestral - music.
To hear the interview, use the player above, and read the transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity):
Brian McCreath Alec Baldwin, thank you for a little of your time today. I appreciate it.
Alec Baldwin My great pleasure. Thank you.
Brian McCreath I want to ask you about Lincoln Portrait because I wonder whether this is something that you have narrated before. I know you've narrated with the Boston Pops before, but have you done Lincoln Portrait with any other orchestra?
Alec Baldwin I just did this out in Pasadena. The Pasadena Symphony asked me to do this about a month ago. I flew out there because I had had little chunks of time on my hands where I could do this kind of thing that involved traveling, you know, across the country. I know I did it once. I believe it might have been either with Dutoit in Philadelphia or at SPAC [Saratoga Performing Arts Center], because his wife Chantal would produce those programs like The Soldier's Tale or [The Young Person's] Guide to the Orchestra, Peter and the Wolf, all the, you know, and Lincoln Portrait fits into that file of things to do. So yes, I have done it before, but I think it was, maybe SPAC years ago.
Brian McCreath So a little while. Tell me about the preparation when you approach doing something like Lincoln Portrait and specifically for this weekend. Is it at all similar to the preparation you do for an acting role?
Alec Baldwin Well, I think that like any kind of work you do that involves voice work, if you're narrating a show, if it's a pure voiceover for some type of programming, whether it's narrative or documentary, the same is true for this: you want to do as little as possible and get out of the way of what's really being featured. Like, if I do a film and you can't understand the film with the sound turned off, if you can't have some sense of what's going on cinematically, I mean purely by pictures, then that's not good. If I do a voiceover for a documentary series, like a nature program, you don't want to put all the drama in your voice. The drama needs to be up on screen, and you just kind of subtly lay back and don't do too much hand-holding for the audience in terms of the tone. And the same is true with this. I mean, I watched a clip the other day of Hillary Clinton doing this. She did Lincoln Portrait the other day. I think it was at Carnegie Hall, and she nailed it because she did as little as possible. You just don't have to really do very much at all.
Brian McCreath That's fascinating. I would not have expected that, but it also makes me wonder, maybe my next question isn't very relevant, but I wondered about your preparation for this and reading these words by Lincoln and by Copland and how you're reflecting on that this particular weekend of the nation's 250th birthday.
Alec Baldwin Well, first of all, I'm appalled that it's the nation's 250th birthday, which means it's 50 years since I graduated high school. I graduated high school in 1976. So I can't believe I graduated high school 50 years ago. I'm starkly reminded of that while we're going through this weekend. But I don't want to say glibly that, you know, Lincoln is always a good default person to build a program around for something to honor the country. But it's true. I mean, Lincoln is the— he's probably the best person for us to array some kind of program like this around in terms of everyone's mutual feelings. I think probably the smallest group in this country today are Lincoln detractors. Lincoln is someone who is admired and seen as probably the central figure in where this country is now on either side of the aisle. So honoring Lincoln in that way is something I'm all for. I mean, I'm a Fourth of July person in that I want the country— I'm always thinking lately that I want the country to at least make it to the next Fourth of July. I want the country to go on and heal its problems and so forth, which we have many of right now.
And at the same time, I'm not someone who— I mean, when I was younger, maybe, but now I'm not someone who's running around and chasing fireworks displays and things. I think right now for me, what I'm doing is giving a lot of serious thought and a lot of really, a lot of very real hope that the country's going to start to turn around to become less volatile than it is now.
Brian McCreath Wise words. I would love to ask you about your love of orchestral music and classical music in general. And so I've heard you tell this story of— I think you said it was in the '80s that you were listening to some pop music on the radio and suddenly, somehow, you found yourself listening to Mahler 9 with Chicago and Solti.
Alec Baldwin Yes, yes, that's exactly right.
Brian McCreath What was it about that moment that completely changed your approach to classical music?
Alec Baldwin Peter Frampton, of all people, the rock musician, did my podcast, and we were talking about different instruments he would use and that he would integrate into his performances, these sound boxes and things that he was very well known for. And he said to me something very interesting. He said, I make music, I'm a musician, but for me, what I'm very interested in is sound. I just want to make different sounds, and what kind of sounds do I want to try to develop and coerce from the equipment I have and the personnel that I have. And that stayed with me. He was on my show years ago, and that stayed with me because, to me, all music is sound. And what sound are they making? Is it a cacophonous, angry, hypersexualized, you know, whatever? Then the answer is no, I don't really have much of an appetite for that. But where the Mahler 9 came into my life with Solti and the Chicago, it was obviously like falling in love. I mean, I just really, really couldn't help myself. And right after that, on the heels of that, I was listening to Szell and the Cleveland do the Mahler Four with Judith Raskin as the soloist. And I really had this passion develop for this music because it was— I just was ready. Popular music other than the music I grew up on, the music of my childhood, Beatles, Zeppelin, Stones, and The Who, and many more on top of that in the rock canon I loved, but at that age, I was about 35 years old or 30 years old, 1980... probably in my late 20s, and I just started to listen to and collect discs. I would go to Tower Classical on Sunset Boulevard, and I would order my discs, and I'd come back in a week or two and pick them up. And I collected a lot of discs before we got into the era of digital downloads. And I think I don't need to explain to you or anybody else who is a fan of classical music and a devotee of classical music that it just began to expand. Then I was asked— the next beat is Mark Travis, who is the producer of "The New York Philharmonic This Week" on WQXR and, you know, licensed around the country.
And Mark is a musicologist beyond compare. He writes all the copy that I do. And in my conversations with him, to learn about what I was saying, to understand this world and these individuals and ensembles and so forth, the composers, the maestros, the soloists, Marc led me by the hand through an invaluable education about those subjects. And I got to be broadened and broadened and understand more, you know, why this is good and why this is not as good, or why this is— I mean, you're talking to a guy who I've got probably 12 or 14 Mahler 9ths in my phone. And only because I want to find the guy that squeezes the most time out of the fourth movement, out of the Adagio, which I think now the answer is Maazel with the New York Philharmonic. Haitink is probably the shortest I have, which is— I think Maazel extends that Adagio movement almost 5 minutes longer than Haitink. And I think to myself, you know, I got Segerstam, I got all these people, playing the Ninth, Rattle, and all these different people. And I just love to listen to little nuances and little differences that Mark taught me. I mean, I learned all of it from Mark.
Brian McCreath Yeah, amazing. I just did this with Mahler 5 because of a new recording. I went back and I looked at all these recordings and added up how long they were, and they ranged from 1 hour— you could do Mahler 5 in 1 hour if you're Bruno Walter— all the way to an hour and— I think it was hour and 18 minutes, and it was Haitink, in fact, that would do it in an hour and 18 minutes. So I appreciate that love of the nuance and the differences of these things. And for Mahler 9 to be the entry, more or less, of you into classical music is kind of amazing. That's a deep dive if ever there was a deep dive.
Alec Baldwin Well, it depends also where you hear a piece, and you hear the piece and don't get— I mean, you know this better than I do— you don't get swayed by who the personnel is, meaning I'm listening to... One of my favorite Barber Adagio for Strings is Thomas Schippers with the New York Philharmonic. His is absolutely gorgeous. And so I have— I've got several of the Barber in my phone. Let me get you another one here that I think is interesting. Hold on one second. I have here my favorite Mahler 5 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the conductor is Frank Shipway. I never heard of Frank Shipway until I heard this piece playing somewhere. You know, I mean, it was on the radio or something online. And I remember sitting there going... And when I find something I like, and you go to Apple, for example, to download music, you don't always find it on the first two or three passes. You have to rearrange the words. Normally I'll Google his name and I'll look at the cover and I'll analyze the cover and see if I can find that because I'd rather buy this stuff. I don't want to have Spotify or Apple Music. If I want music, I buy it. I just pay for it. And I've got, you know, 1,200 classical albums in my phone or something like that. But I'll find people that aren't the usual suspects, you know what I mean? And I have a rich experience with it. This guy Shipway, and the Royal Philharmonic did the Mahler 5. It's gorgeous. It's absolutely gorgeous.
Brian McCreath You've given me a new one to look up and add to my own database. That's great. That's great. Well, one more question, just really quick. You spend so much time with the New York Philharmonic on the board and as host of broadcasts. Do you ever feel like you're watching the Philharmonic and hearing them play in the concert hall, and you— there's something you take away from that that you bring to your work outside of that world in your work as an actor?
Alec Baldwin Oh, yes.
Brian McCreath How so?
Alec Baldwin Well, one of the keys to acting, I think, is to maintain a neutrality. And you go to work, and you can't be— we always say you can't have the wind blow your sails too much in one direction or the other. You can't become too happy and giggly and, you know, your wife bought you a car, and you can't wait to go home and drive your new car or something silly. I'm just making this up. But the idea is you must be present where you are to do what you're doing. You can't be too angry or down. There's a neutrality you have to try to attain so that when you go out, you do the acting, and you play the scene, you begin from a neutral place. Let the scene evolve your emotions and your temperament. You don't want to walk in there loaded for bear, so to speak, because you may not be hunting bear within five minutes of the scene playing. I mean, it goes in its own way. So a lot of it is worked out in advance, yes, from the reading. And classical music is the great palate cleanser, the neurological palate, the neuron cleanser, let's call it.
Classical music, when you listen to what you need to listen to, it could be anything from Gershwin, or it could be something light and joyful, Fountains of Rome, or something like that. You could be listening to something very sonorous like...my favorite Isle of the Dead is Michael Galen. I forget which ensemble he's with. You can listen to something very dark, very moody, very strong. As I joke with people all the time, they say, "What's your favorite music?" I say, "Well, I'm always re-editing my funeral list." The music that's gonna play at my funeral, you know? So, dark and strong, Mahler 9, Mahler 5, Mahler 6, powerful music like that. Beethoven. I'm less interested in Mozart than maybe I ought to be. I respect Mozart, but I don't listen to a lot of it. And Ravel I worship, and Rachmaninoff I worship, and Tchaikovsky I worship. And I listen to this stuff all the time. In the work that I do, it really helps to kind of calm you down. Music can really, really— it's like a drug you take that really relaxes you.
Brian McCreath I could talk with you about all of this all day, but for now, we'll stop. Listen, I also just— I'm going to be bold and extend an open invitation. Anytime you're around when there's a Boston Symphony concert, I want to welcome you to the broadcast booth because I host our Boston Symphony broadcasts. And if you want to co-host with me sometime, just say the word. I'm there with it.
Alec Baldwin It'll be my great honor. My great honor.
Brian McCreath Well, thank you for this time, Alec Baldwin. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to Lincoln Portrait on Sunday.
Alec Baldwin Have a great holiday weekend.