PROFILE : The Mixmaster Maestro : John Mauceri is having a wonderful time, thank you very much, blending pops, opera and symphony work as ‘the Garrison Keillor of conductors’

It was ballet night at the vast, 18,000-seat Hollywood Bowl. The enormous movie screens at either edge of the stage were hardly necessary for the folks up front, conductor John Mauceri quipped, but they would be indispensable to “you people back there in another area code.”

Actually, the film-land technology was a flop--everything was too red, dancers were cut off at the knees, cameras were too often on the wrong dancer. But what did come across on screen, in living color, was the movie-star style of maestro Mauceri.

He is California blond and talk-show glib and uses lighting effects onstage he probably picked up conducting Broadway shows earlier in his career. Whether schmoozing with the audience or flashing love-me smiles at them over his shoulder, Mauceri clearly learned a lot more than conducting from his longtime mentor, the late Leonard Bernstein.

Leading the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at home, on recordings and on tour, the 46-year-old conductor is doing just what he said he would. As early as his first press statement here back in October, 1990, he promised “an orchestra for all tastes,” one that would preserve “America’s great musical heritage from Hollywood, Broadway and the concert hall.”

On Thursday, for instance, Mauceri’s Hollywood Bowl Orchestra filled in for its sister orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, while the Philharmonic was in Salzburg, Austria. The fare was traditional Mendelssohn and Strauss--plus Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Symphonic Suite, Robin Hood,” based on his film score for “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” And coming up Friday and Saturday is “Broadway in Hollywood,” a program of show music, film scores and an Irving Berlin tribute with actress-singer Patti LuPone.

All three of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra’s pops-oriented albums have nestled in the Top 10 of Billboard magazine’s classical crossover chart, and the first, “Hollywood Dreams,” came in 11th for the year. The orchestra’s fourth album, due out next month, features Julie Andrews, Ben Kingsley and Marilyn Horne in a big-budget recording of “The King and I” film score.

Movie music, long the Cinderella of the concert world, has found its Prince Charming in Mauceri. “John is a wonderful advocate for whatever music he conducts, and I’m always thrilled when he chooses to do mine,” says John Williams, who composed scores for such films as “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” “It always pleases me that he’s a specialist in film music, and so interested in it as well as the broader repertoire.”

Given that movie scores generally do quite nicely for every record company and pops orchestra that touches them, Mauceri has chosen his specialty well. Few conductors or orchestras are so well suited--both geographically and temperamentally--to mine the field.

Maestro Mauceri could do worse than promote works by such composers as Williams, Korngold, Max Steiner (“Gone With the Wind”) and Bernard Herrmann (“Citizen Kane”). He’s also gone back after 25 years to composing, a pastime he says could well lead him too into writing film music.

As is apparent to anyone who’s seen him onstage at the Bowl, the man is having a wonderful time. Positioned in the very heart of Hollywood, a place that’s been magical to him since childhood, the ambitious conductor is leading an orchestra of top musicians and getting plenty of attention for his trouble.

One of very, very few musicians to conduct pops music and be taken seriously by opera companies and symphonies, Mauceri is also well situated to argue that the popular arts are not inferior ones. And if such things as serving as host of “Stage,” a weekly show on the Arts & Entertainment cable network, will help that goal along, all the better.

He is similarly determined to eliminate artificial barriers between the popular and classic arts. In the running to succeed composer Williams when he retires from leading the Boston Pops at the end of next year, Mauceri is also in his seventh and final year as music director of the Scottish Opera in Glasgow.

“(People) want to define things,” he explains. “If you do pop, you’re not serious. I don’t appear to be revolutionary, because I comfort you into accepting things you might not have otherwise accepted--a wider world of music and art. But I’m very much at the edge. I am quite subversive.”

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It is hot and humid outside, and the subversive conductor is in white shorts, black golf shirt and sneakers, overseeing a programming meeting with his staff. He is reviewing what he calls “the brew,” the order and mix of material in each program.

“You’re like somebody in an art gallery who is choosing which art will be shown and how it will hang in combination with other artworks,” Mauceri says later. “How you hang pictures changes them, and the same is true of programming. When you choose a major work and put two other works near it, you make new music of all of it.”

Both onstage and in his recordings, Mauceri combines musical genres to illustrate their common threads. The “Hollywood Dreams” album may end with the Flying Theme from Williams’ “E.T.,” for instance, but it begins with Arnold Schoenberg’s “Fanfare for a Bowl Concert.” In the same way, Igor Stravinksy’s “Firebird Suite” is sandwiched between Steiner’s main title from “Gone With the Wind” and Alfred Newman’s 20th Century-Fox Fanfare.

“In what other fields is popular support suspect?” he asked a gathering of performing arts administrators in Glasgow two years ago. Composer Milton Babbit once gave Princeton student Stephen Sondheim a copy of Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” to analyze, Mauceri told them, and George Gershwin studied composition with Schoenberg.

Commentary on such matters, not to mention the Salem witch trials, strange musical instruments and anything else that might cross his mind, generally peppers Mauceri’s Bowl performances. “The concerts seem to be moving toward a radio show with various compartments,” he says. “I’m sort of the Garrison Keillor of conductors.”

Mauceri introduced a key chunk of Herrmann’s “Psycho” film score a few weeks ago, for instance, as “40 seconds in the shower with Janet Leigh.” And discussing how MGM dumped its music library into a landfill to solve space problems, he noted that “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is now “somewhere under the Santa Monica Freeway.”

While reviews of his conducting have been mixed, such lively discourse generally draws raves. A professor at Yale for 15 years, Mauceri is clearly comfortable in front of an audience, whether it is a lone reporter, a camera crew from Arts & Entertainment or 18,000 concert-goers at the Bowl.

“John is an actor,” says Susan Wittenberg, Arts & Entertainment’s director of performing arts. “He plays to the crowd.”

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Mauceri traces the start of his public patter to the late ‘80s and a last-minute call to stand in for Williams on a Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra tour. It all happened so fast, there was no time to rewrite programs, Mauceri says, so each evening he would tell the audience both who he was and what the Pops were playing that night.

“I grew up in a Sicilian household, so I just talked to the audience the way we all talked at dinner,” he quips. “The first concert was in New Jersey. It was 100 degrees out, there was 98% humidity, and we started tuning our instruments. When I told the audience, ‘If you figure what’s happening to your hair now is happening to our strings,’ all the women in the audience reached up and touched their hair and screamed. I realized you could make people laugh very easily and at the same time teach them something.”

Mauceri “is a born teacher,” says Oscar-winning composer Michael Gore, who studied orchestration and conducting with Mauceri at Yale and is now producing albums for his teacher’s Bowl orchestra. “He enjoys imparting his knowledge about the music to other people.”

Not that it’s easy doing so up on the Bowl stage, Mauceri demurs: “The hardest part of the job I’ve given myself is the talking to an audience. It makes what I do, without exaggeration, three times as difficult--keeping all of this in your mind, without a cue card or a TelePrompTer. I don’t even leave the stage, except for intermission.”

But it’s well worth it. The same way he sweeps Bowl visitors into his world here by telling stories about music history, his nightmares or even his dog Janet, so he sweeps in other audiences. Mauceri’s 11-day tour with the orchestra to Japan last winter included music from such international movie hits as “The Rocketeer” and “Dances With Wolves”--and talks with the audience.

Before the orchestra left for Japan, Mauceri brought in a Japanese tutor, then wrote things out phonetically. The result: Fans wouldn’t let the orchestra off the stage, recalls Rich Capparela, who filed daily reports on the tour for classical station KKGO-FM (105.1). “To have a conductor turn around and talk to the audience is an odd enough occurrence, but to have him do so in their native language just won their hearts.”

Capparela recalls leaving one concert after the fourth encore and says that in Osaka, dozens of people rushed the stage: “They were grabbing for his hand as he was leaving the stage, and backstage, he walked out of the green room to maybe three dozen swooning young Japanese women who asked him to pose with them, ready to faint away from the excitement.”

Mauceri is a “live-wire American conductor,” says Rodney Milnes, editor of London’s Opera magazine. In Scotland, he says, Mauceri made his biggest impact by importing a lot of American music and singers. “He is completely new blood, something no opera company here had had before.”

The maestro’s impact hasn’t been lost on his new bosses at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which operates the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Letters reached Bowl subscribers earlier this month offering the chance to travel the South Pacific with the glamorous conductor on the John Mauceri Gala Benefit Cruise early next year. And response to Mauceri’s signings of the orchestra’s CDs at the Bowl last weekend was reportedly so large that more than 25 people had to be turned away.

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Mauceri has long enjoyed being the center of attention. The film of “The King and I” so impressed him at age 10 that he went home to East Meadow, on New York’s Long Island, and organized, directed and starred in his own production in his back yard. He designed all the sets and costumes, and when he didn’t like the way the other children sounded, one childhood friend recalls, he made them lip-sync the whole thing to the Broadway cast album.

The conductor is, in fact, a living testimonial to the importance of early exposure to the arts. He was playing the piano at 4 and taken to “Oklahoma!” at 6 and “Carousel” at 9. He had a puppet theater with which he presented variety shows and historical pageants, and in his teens he decorated his bedroom walls with signed photographs of Metropolitan Opera stars.

Ed Sullivan and his contemporaries also had an impact.

“When I was 5 is when television really happened in America,” Mauceri says. “For me, that funny round blue screen was the window to the arts, history and other cultures; it was a porthole. That’s where I saw Toscanini conduct, Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein. The first time I saw opera was on NBC; ‘Madama Butterfly’ came out of the same box.”

Mauceri received encouragement in all this from his grandfather Baldassare Mauceri, a pianist, violinist and conductor, but his physician father urged more practical study. The young man went to Yale to study medicine, “but when I took my first conducting lesson,” he recalls, “I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor. I didn’t want to make music just on weekends. I didn’t want a day to go by without being involved with music.”

He has hardly left the stage since graduating from Yale in music in 1967. He conducted the Yale Symphony for several seasons and, in 1971, was conducting at Tanglewood when Leonard Bernstein heard him and invited him to work on a new production of “Carmen.”

A few years later, Bernstein suggested Mauceri to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Mauceri made his major orchestral conducting debut in 1974. He also conducted Bernstein’s “Candide” in New York, Glasgow and London, where it won the Olivier Award for best musical in 1988.

The energetic conductor’s biography runs three double-spaced pages, with paragraph after paragraph of achievements conducting major orchestras, opera premieres and award-winning recordings. He has conducted at the Royal Opera in London, La Scala in Milan, the Met in New York.

Mauceri was the first music director at New York’s American Symphony Orchestra after the death of its founder, Leopold Stokowski. And it was also Stokowski, who briefly served as music director and conductor in residence at the Hollywood Bowl in the ‘40s, whom Mauceri followed at the Bowl.

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Mauceri was at home in Glasgow one evening when he received a call from Costa Pilavachi, Philips Classics’ vice president for artists and repertoire. The Netherlands-based record company had lost the Boston Pops to Sony Classical in late 1989 and wanted to have a major presence in the United States.

Pilavachi had an idea. Everyone had heard of the Hollywood Bowl but couldn’t really tell you what orchestra played there. And the makings of a great orchestra already existed, playing in the Hollywood studios. Why not move those studio musicians to the Bowl and call them the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra?

“But to put them onstage and make them into an ensemble with an international profile and a corporate personality required someone like John Mauceri,” Pilavachi says today. “And since he is one of a kind, you needed John Mauceri. The horse needs a head, and John was the obvious person. He is the preeminent conductor in this field.”

Mauceri agreed immediately, he recalls: “It seemed like a summation of what I’d been doing my whole life. It wasn’t something I really had to think about.”

Ernest Fleischmann, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s executive vice president and managing director, also responded “instantly and enthusiastically,” Pilavachi says. The Philharmonic had long been overscheduled at the Bowl.

“There’s a great tradition here,” says the ever-politic Mauceri. “It’s not as if I’m starting from scratch. There is a big, trusting audience that comes to the Bowl, and that’s the legacy of the Philharmonic under Ernest Fleischmann.”

He soon sat down at his word processor and turned out a five-page “mission statement” of repertory for recordings and concerts that everyone involved still consults. Recording contracts were signed, the Japanese tour booked and a Hollywood Bowl season planned for last summer even before an orchestra was selected from the city’s studio musicians.

The first time the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and Mauceri met one another was in February, 1991, when they gathered to record their first album, “Hollywood Dreams.” “There were mistakes in the parts, wrong notes and antiquated music (on some of the original scores they used),” recalls orchestra concertmaster Bruce Dukov. “Yet never for a moment did we think he was not at ease. When we see someone like that, it makes us feel at ease as well. And it’s only gotten better.”

Composer Gore, who produced “Hollywood Dreams,” guesses he had worked with more than 60% of the musicians on his own music, and Mauceri knew many from conducting he had done at Orange County’s Opera Pacific and elsewhere. As for the others, he told orchestra personnel manager Ken Watson, “I didn’t want a musician who would look at his watch the minute the rehearsal was over to see if we went into overtime. I didn’t want people for whom it was just a gig.”

Since musicians are hired on a program-by-program basis and make more money doing studio work, that is unlikely.

“John says this is a self-cleaning orchestra,” says drummer Brian Miller. “If anybody’s not happy here, he or she doesn’t have to be here. The magic he works with the audience he works with the orchestra as well.”

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Rumors persist that Mauceri is a serious contender to succeed John Williams at the Boston Pops when he moves on. Mauceri filled in for Williams on the July 4 concert and telecast with the Boston Pops, and as Williams himself puts it: “John is a great favorite in Boston, just as he is in Los Angeles.”

But everyone from Williams to Mauceri’s New York-based manager, Jonathan Brill, calls any speculation premature. There are other contenders, and the Pops has yet to make its decision. “They’re looking for a conductor, and John is a natural person for them to think about,” Brill says. “But he has not been offered the job.”

Mauceri dismisses talk of his going to Boston, saying that the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra “is the greatest orchestra I’ve ever conducted, and (it) has been created as much by me as for me. It reflects my deepest hopes and aspirations for orchestra music and has as its potential the entire gamut of orchestral repertory.

“Look what they’re letting me do (at the Bowl),” Mauceri says excitedly. “(One) weekend I played John Adams’ ‘The Chairman Dances’ to more than 30,000 people (at three concerts). They listened to a minimalist piece for 12 minutes and even applauded. You can actually change the world a little bit.”

Why go to Boston? Mauceri asks, and it’s a good question. He can chart his own course here. “I’m not following Arthur Fiedler in this job,” he says. “I’m not following anybody in this job. I love Boston, but there’s no reason to jump ship. I’m really very happy building something here.”

He certainly does seem content, whether telling jokes onstage, mugging for the TV cameras or tooling around Los Angeles in his sporty white convertible. He even looks like a native in his designer-casual lavender and pale blue clothes, his sneakers and boots. As he recently told interviewer Tom Schnabel of KCRW-FM (89.9): “People in New York thought I was from Los Angeles, and I always took it as a compliment.”

When Mauceri’s commitment to the Scottish Opera, which consumes about half the year, ends next summer, he plans to do more guest conducting and to increase his time in Los Angeles. He figures he’s here now three or four months a year, given the Bowl season and recordings.

He won’t give up his New York base, however--at least not for a while. Betty, his wife of 24 years, and his teen-age son Ben are both in school in New York, and, he says, “we’re not a family to pick up and move every time I get a job. There has to be a central home as I move around. That’s why they aren’t living in Glasgow.”

End of conversation. Even without his baton, Mauceri takes charge. He’s outgoing and available for chats, but the agenda is clearly his. No interviews are to take place at his rented home, and information is carefully packaged. Yes, he has received calls about possibly composing film scores, “but when I get serious about it, I’ll talk about it.”

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Better to stick to the high-profile stuff. He has an active recording career with London/Decca, now planned to the year 2000 with as many as two complete operas a year, mostly in Berlin. He’s cut about 10 records so far for the label, including an extensive Kurt Weill series.

The maestro and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra also have a five-year, 15-CD contract with Philips, and in early September they will record an album called “Earth Day.” Subtitled “A Day in the Life of Planet Earth,” it will sweep in 75 minutes and 100 years of music from Ravel, Nielsen, Debussy and others.

The recording, which follows by a few months the Boston Pops’ “Green Album” of environmentally themed music, is scheduled for release on the next Earth Day, April 27. It will probably be followed by “Oklahoma!” with country singers and a recording of American classics. Producer Gore foresees more music composed in Hollywood, more Rodgers & Hammerstein shows, more “star” castings, more Broadway musicals.

Expect more touring too. Besides a probable return to Japan in 1993-94 and a likely tour next summer of such U.S. festivals as Wolf Trap and Ravinia, Mauceri wants to add a European tour with film scores and other work by such U.S. immigrants as Austrian-born Korngold and Steiner. “We want to bring (their) music back to Vienna and Berlin,” Mauceri says. “It’s a dream, but it could happen.”