TV REVIEW : Boston Pops Changes the Guard

Faces and stylistic turns may change, but there is a comforting predictability to that stalwart institution, the Boston Pops Orchestra. The frothy party mix of light classical music and orchestrated pop amounts to a warm, fuzzy cultural phenomenon.

So, while the big news within the Boston Pops is the arrival of a new conductor, 35-year-old Keith Lockhart--only the third since 1930, after Arthur Fiedler and John Williams--rest assured that there is no upheaval in sight. “Opening Night at Pops,” the first program of the summerlong PBS series, documents Lockhart’s debut with requisite pomp and pleasantry, in true Pops fashion.

What other venerable American musical organization could make so seamless--and shameless--a leap between “Alleluia” from Mozart’s “Exsultate, jubilate” (sung with grace by soprano Sylvia McNair) and Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” from “The Lion King”? What other orchestra begins its proceedings with Dvorak’s “Carnival Overture,” rendered with a creamy professionalism, and ends with John Philip Sousa?

McNair at one point suggests, in a telling comment, that “making selections for a concert like this is like making selections from a dessert cart. You want everything.” She ventures boldly from the stuff of Mozart to a strait-laced, lush version of Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are,” with nary a trace of the loose suavity that has made it a jazz standard.

Guest of honor Mandy Patinkin serves up a dessert tray of American pop tarts, including a version of “Jitterbug Waltz” replete with faux archival black-and-white treatment and a vintage microphone. A sage Williams toasts the incoming young blood, joined by Patinkin, McNair and a glittery-garbed Doc Severinsen, who looks more at home on the small screen than any of them.

In all, Lockhart’s housewarming program gains in cozy reassurance what it may lack in derring-do. The Americana is laid on thick by program’s end, as the brassy strains of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and Sousa are topped by a release of celebratory helium balloons. It’s a Pops thing.

* “Opening Night at Pops” will air at 8 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.