July is the busiest time of year for a pyrotechnician. But this summer, the stakes are higher and the stage is bigger for the ones behind the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. Not only is it the Fourth of July, but also the nation’s 250th anniversary — and that combo is expected to draw a record crowd of 500,000 people to the Charles River Esplanade. (That’s more than the total population size of Worcester, Springfield and Cambridge combined.) With that in mind, you’d expect any fireworks producer to feel insurmountable pressure to make this year’s show one for the ages. But Matt Shea, regional manager of Pyrotecnico Fireworks and the producer for this year’s show in Boston, said he's thinking of it as just another year. “If this was 1998, I would've been a little nervous,” Shea said, referring to when he first started out in the industry. Since then, he's designed shows for events watched by millions of people. This year alone, the company executed fireworks for the Super Bowl, the NFL Draft in Pittsburgh and the NBA playoffs. Shea has also been the brains behind the Boston Pops fireworks shows since 2021, producing and designing what the night sky will look like long before the firework shells are delivered to barges on the Charles River. I spoke with him to get a peek into what’s different about this year’s Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular and what it will take to pull it off. Conducting the nightPlanning Boston’s July Fourth fireworks starts early — only a few weeks after the prior year's show. And the planning for this year came with some big questions. “When you’re looking at a show like Boston’s Fourth, it is already a significant show,” Shea said. “And you get asked, ‘We want this to be the biggest and best show that we’ve ever had.’ It becomes kind of daunting because sometimes it’s easier to make something smaller than it is to make it bigger in the world of fireworks.” So, how will they make it more “spectacular”? Aside from the sheer number of fireworks — 4,500 shells, the most of any year Pyrotecnico has designed — this year’s fireworks display will also burst in tandem with live music performed by the Boston Pops for the first time in the show’s history. Shea said that will include a completely original piece by the orchestra only for this show. “It’s a very powerful piece,” Shea said. “It’s very unique for a finale because it ebbs and flows throughout the entire finale. So it’s gonna be like, ‘tease, oh, tease oh.’ Anybody who loves fireworks knows that’s what you love. It’s gonna be fun.” Designing a fireworks show with live music involves listening to the performance over and over, imagining what fireworks effects would look best with the music, Shea said. “They gave me the track at the end of March and I listened to it a few times,” Shea said. “Sometimes I’d listen to it in my car, sometimes I would listen to it while I was doing some work at my desk, I started to scribble out some ideas.” After designing how the fireworks show will play out in software like Show Director and Finale 3D, Shea won’t touch it again until he receives the rehearsal track a few days before the actual show. Now he's making his last minute changes and small adjustments. “The beauty of fireworks is that there’s a nature of imperfection to a certain degree,” he said. “People don’t like perfect fireworks. They want some little bit of nuances. They like the blasting, they like the colors and how it explodes in the sky.” | The Boston Pops orchestra performs during the July Fourth fireworks show in 2023. (Courtesy Boston Symphony Orchestra/Michael Blanchard) |
Boston Pops concertmaster Charles Dimmick told WBUR he’s excited because this will be the first time he actually gets to see the fireworks. “The insider baseball of what usually happens with the Pops is we have some buses and a police escort that whisk us out of the pandemonium while the fireworks are going on. Usually that’s our escape cover,” Dimmick said. “But I think it’s actually going to be really fun to be there and see the fireworks. I’ve been playing the show for 10 years and I’ve not yet seen the fireworks.” Dimmick added that while the musical addition is exciting, he thinks it's the 250th anniversary of America declaring independence from Britain that makes this year’s show more meaningful. “There’s such a great energy about that feeling on the river with that history, and I can only imagine that this year it’s going to be that times 1,000 from what it normally is," Dimmick said. Big show, new tricksFor eagle-eyed firework enjoyers, the music and sheer number of fireworks won’t be the only way this year’s show makes a bang. There will be some new firework effects the company has never used before. That includes the ghost shell from Spain — an expensive shell where after it explodes, it shimmers into multiple different colors — and a new variant of the classic peony shells that “move like a butterfly” in the sky before bursting. Of course, there will also be the traditional fireworks, from the chrysanthemums that explode into the shape of a huge blooming flower and the dahlia that droops into multiple colors to the waterfall fireworks that create a cascading curtain of sparks. “If you get to be the lucky person to be in the area, just enjoy the 250th and enjoy the fireworks display,” Shea said. “It’s going to be the most amazing thing that you’ve ever seen, and we’re all excited to make everybody excited.” | 
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