Looking for New Pops : Symphony: Renewed interest in film and stage music adds variety to the programming.

Since the birth of symphony pops half a century ago, the repertory has remained an amiable mix of accessible classics, Broadway medleys, and pop tune arrangements. According to Jack Everly, the San Diego Symphony’s guest pops conductor through Aug. 22, this genial formula has led to a certain stagnation.

“After you’ve played everything available from the rental libraries, both orchestras and audiences get bored the second time around,” Everly noted. “And with Broadway the way it is, there are few new properties coming into the pops repertory.”

A veteran of Broadway musicals and the ballet pit--Everly is American Ballet Theatre’s principal conductor--he resorts to arranging his own orchestral scores when he cannot locate a chart he needs to enliven a pops theme. For last season’s SummerPops salute to Cole Porter, for example, Everly made a “Kiss Me Kate” medley.

Over the last seven or eight years, Everly has noticed a revival of interest in the golden age of American film and stage music, which has also found its way into pops programming.

“Even though MGM trashed all of its musical library in the 1960s, we’re now going back to salvage and reconstruct the gems of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. I’ve just reconstructed the score for Julie Styne’s MGM film ‘The Bells Are Ringing,’ which I will conduct in London when I leave San Diego.”

Gershwin’s “Promenade,” which Everly has programmed on next week’s all-Gershwin SummerPops offering (Aug. 12-16), is another recent reconstruction from the 1936 RKO movie “Shall We Dance.” According to Everly, even Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra started off as a movie score.

“It began as the sound track for ‘Delicious,’ a movie musical which was not a success. Gershwin then took the material and reworked it for the Second Rhapsody, which he wanted to call ‘Rhapsody in Rivets,’ a tribute to the skyscrapers that had begun to mark the Manhattan skyline around 1930.”

Pianist William Wolfram, soloist in next week’s Second Rhapsody performances, regrets that the work has languished in the shadow of “Rhapsody in Blue,” which he will also play on the all-Gershwin concert.

“Even I didn’t know the Second Rhapsody before I learned it for this program. I can only guess why it has been overlooked, although it may be that it’s slightly less accessible than ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ I think he may have had a couple of drinks when he wrote it.”

Although Gershwin’s orchestral music thrives in pops venues, most American orchestras give him short shrift in straight classical programming.

“I occasionally am asked to play his Concerto in F Major on a classical program, but the rest ends up in pops. I think he deserves both.”

Music with a conscience: The day the Los Angeles riots broke out, soprano Virginia Sublett was in Costa Mesa rehearsing for the Pacific Symphony’s concert performance of Maurice Ravel’s opera “L’Enfant et les Sortileges.” The combination of television coverage and the first-hand reports of Los Angeles singers in the cast made the San Diego soprano want to respond to the unfolding tragedy. When Sublett returned to San Diego, she suggested to Stephen Sturk, music director of St. James Episcopal Church, La Jolla, that a benefit concert for those who suffered in the riots would be appropriate.

“I felt a tragedy of this magnitude needed to be addressed in a variety of ways. I can’t rebuild people’s houses, but music is what I can do,” explained Sublett, who is the regular soprano soloist at the La Jolla Episcopal church when she is not on the road singing opera. Sturk suggested doing the Faure Requiem.

“Many people died in the riots, but in the rush to assess the financial terms of the destruction, more attention was paid to property loss than to the loss of life,” Sublett said. “Stephen felt a Requiem would be a fitting tribute.”

The benefit concert of the Faure Requiem will be given at 4 p.m. Aug. 16 at St. James Episcopal Church, and the offering will be given to the Los Angeles Bishop’s fund, which was set up to aid persons left needy by the riot.

Sublett noted that the response from local musicians, all of whom will donate their time to the benefit concert, has been heartening.

“The chorus will number 50 people,” she said. “Musicians from across the singing community, including many local church choirs and the San Diego Opera Chorus, have joined the singers from the St. James choir.”

In addition to the Requiem, the program will include Faure’s “Cantique de Jean Racine” with harpist Marian Ryan Hays and Durufle’s “Ubi Caritas.”

Obscurely Mozart. Local tenor Jose Medina, who won second place in this year’s Musical Merit competition and was a finalist in the 1989 Metropolitan Opera auditions here, will sing in this month’s Lincoln Center production of Mozart’s “La Finta Semplice” under German conductor Leopold Hager. The nine-opera series of the composer’s less-familiar operas culminates the New York music center’s 19-month Mozart bicentennial project in which all 626 Mozart works were performed.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

CLASSICAL GUITAR

Classical guitarist Randy Pile, a protege of Pepe Romero, continues the MUSE chamber music series with a solo recital Sunday night at 7 p.m. at La Jolla’s First Congregational Church. Pile is a virtuoso of unusual agility, and his low-keyed approach is always ingratiating.