RECORD REVIEW : ‘Hollywood Dreams’: Whatever Pops Out : Conductor John Mauceri’s hype burdens the well-played debut disc of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

Well, it’s arrived. The much hyped, thoroughly pragmatic union of Philips’ merchandising needs and the Hollywood Bowl mass culture image has been blessed with the first of 15 contractual progeny. Talk about planned parenthood. . . .

Their issue, of course, is “Hollywood Dreams,” the debut disc of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra (Philips 432 109-2). The ensemble is “an activity of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn.,” with A&R; courtesy of Philips’ Costa Pilavachi.

What this meeting of interests, if not minds, has wrought so far is a dandy pops collection of mostly movie music. That there are many other such offerings available seems only to have encouraged the marketing maestros. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but the recording industry seldom rushes in to plug gaping repertory holes, preferring instead to copy proven sellers.

The orchestra also promises to record Beethoven symphonies. Now, that’s exciting . . . zzzzzzzz .

This relatively modest disc is a generally engaging, well-played pops collection. It comes burdened, however, with a lot of extracurricular sociological baggage. Conductor John Mauceri has been busy telling anyone who will listen that this is not a pops orchestra. “ ‘Pops concerts’ are the worst idea in the world. It’s like putting a leech on a corpse,” he told an industry audience in Scotland last year.

He also asserts that this orchestra can break down the wall he sees between serious and popular music.

“We can help audiences because they will trust us,” he claims in Musical America magazine, “. . . and we can play a great many styles of music which I think in the long run will help other symphony orchestras.”

Mauceri’s defensiveness about the P word leads him into extravagant rhetoric, inconsistent in argument and unfounded in many of its historical assumptions. The notion also that there is something unprecedented about the repertory and playing of this band is a staggering conceit.

Not that Mauceri isn’t willing to carry the full load for the musicians. This pickup orchestra, he says, already has a distinctive sound, thanks to his own efforts.

On the evidence of this recording, that sound is the bright, taut type characteristic of orchestras shaped by the digital recording studio, such as the Montreal Symphony or, more pertinently, the Cincinnati Pops. Under Mauceri, its suave emotional sweep, however, recalls the Fiedler-era Boston Pops more than Erich Kunzel’s often harried product.

And pops this disc is. Yes, the tag is both limiting and non-exclusive, as such generic labels are, but it describes--not necessarily with condescension--the area in which the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra’s efforts are clearly centered.

Mauceri’s leveling theories are reflected in the “Hollywood Dreams” agenda. Interlaced among the film tracks are Schoenberg’s brief, Wagnerian “Fanfare for a Bowl Concert” derived from “Gurrelieder” themes, the last two movements of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” suite and an instrumental excerpt from Prokofiev’s opera “Semyon Kotko.”

The Stravinsky, for example, is included in the 1945 version because, the liner notes suggest, he re-orchestrated it under the influence of Hollywood. Forget the fact that these particular movements are among those little altered from the 1919 suite (and that commercial publishing realities had as much to do with the revision as artistic imperatives). Forget the more suggestive point that the movements selected happen to be sections of the suite that probably require the least rehearsal.

The “Firebird” music is also the most modern-sounding piece on the disc, possibly excepting John Williams’ “Flying Theme” from “E.T.” (Relax, Maestro, that was not a value judgment.) This is deeply conservative repertory. Switch directly from Max Steiner’s “Gone With the Wind” main title to John Barry’s “John Dunbar Theme” from “Dances With Wolves” and see how little difference a half-century can make.

The idea that this endeavor might represent a stylistic new direction and the popular salvation of symphony orchestras is unsettling. Philips should know its market, but it is hard to believe that this kind of program is really going to cut a swathe in the BMW crowd, let alone the kids who just want their MTV.

For those who do want this sort of program, Mauceri & Co. deliver it vividly, in clear sonics. The weakest performance--unfocused and thin sounding--is in the Love Music from Erich Korngold’s “Adventures of Robin Hood.”

Elsewhere, the music-making is reasonably assured and potently directed, whether in the plush mode for Franz Waxman’s “A Place in the Sun” and Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Waterfront” excerpts, or dancing jauntily in selections from Richard Rodgers’ “Carousel” or Alfred Newman’s “How to Marry a Millionaire.”

A concert suite culled from “The Wizard of Oz” and the finale of producer Michael Gore’s “Defending Your Life” score complete the generous program.