MANCINI AND GALWAY AT THE BOWL

Weekend pops concerts at Hollywood Bowl have never been considered a forum for ultra-serious music-making.

But rarely have they served as little more than opening dates for a cross-country tour designed to promote a hit album. When composer-conductor Henry Mancini strolled on stage after intermission with his guest soloist, flutist James Galway, Friday night, the scores that awaited him on the podium were all represented in the recent Mancini-Galway vinyl collaboration “In the Pink.”

Mancini good-naturedly plugged the record and recounted how this mega-buck partnership began--at a Grammy Awards ceremony, appropriately enough. Then, the two launched into an endless survey of some of Mancini’s better-known tunes, from “Baby Elephant Walk” (Galway on penny whistle) through “The Pink Panther” and the inevitable “Moon River.”

The melodies, of course, are consistently wonderful--even though there was little for Galway to do with them but play along with the humming multitudes (15,245 on Friday). The biggest surprise of this set was Mancini’s listless accompaniment of the reduced, and rather thin-sounding, Philharmonic. The Irish flutist’s delightful stage demeanor served as the only relief from tedium.

Far more rewarding was the first half, which mixed Mancini music with works of Victor Young and Miklos Rozsa (whom the conductor acknowledged as early influences) and a trio of classics by Hoagy Carmichael. Mancini proved a congenial host and unobtrusive time-beater, finding his way to the piano only for the Carmichael trilogy.

A dreamy setting of Young’s “Around the World in 80 Days” theme and a rip-roaring run-through of Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” were particular stand-outs (with electric bass player Abraham Laboriel stealing the show with an extended solo- cum- dance routine introduction to “Gunn”).

The evening opened and closed with a pair of novelties: Mancini’s “Overture to a Pops Concert,” written for the Boston Pops Centenary, and “Cameo for Flute . . . for James,” a brief ditty written for Galway. Neither piece remained in the mind as far as the parking lot.

As an encore, Galway was joined by a budding flutist named Mancini in a delightful two-flute-plus-orchestra setting of “Seventy-Six Trombones.”