A Night of Blood, Guts and Kitsch : Music review: Final week of Bowl concerts begins with an extrovert pops program conducted by Robert Spano.

The Hollywood Bowl summer--the season of delirious symphonies, communal picnics and merry social intercourse under the stars--is dwindling to a close. For some observers, the end doesn’t come a hemidemisemiquaver too soon.

To open the final week of gargantuan concerts at Cahuenga Pass, the management invited Robert Spano, incipient music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and latest leader in our endless parade of guest conductors, to guide the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program of familiar blood, guts and kitsch. It was a pretty good night for thumping hum-along indulgence, a pretty bad night for subtlety, introspection or finesse.

In his recently published memoirs, Michael Tilson Thomas, public hero No. 1 in San Francisco, calls outdoor concerts “a curse laid upon mankind by I don’t know whom.” The description was inspired by an extended battle he refereed at our Bowl in the summer of ’85. A police helicopter won. The Mahler 8th lost.

Although a relatively modest audience of 7,819 endured the usual aeronautical intrusions on Tuesday, the distractions did not seem drastic. The repertory chosen didn’t demand a great deal of concentration. Everyone--on both sides of the proscenium and in the sky--seemed to be operating comfortably on automatic pilot.

Everyone? Well, not quite. One participant seemed to find the event genuinely invigorating.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the dapper young pianist from Lyon, rode two tired warhorses of Franz Liszt to splashy-flashy victory. Resplendent in black tie, white dinner jacket and crimson socks, he sighed and surged with uncanny bravado through the oozing platitudes of the Piano Concerto No. 1. After intermission, he returned to pound his elegant way through that insufferably portentous, knuckle-busting endurance contest known as the “Totentanz.”

Give Thibaudet credit. He tried valiantly to make Liszt’s overblown Sturm and Drang actually sound like music. And, unless the reasonably kind microphones created a false impression, he did so with genuine power as well as expressive sensitivity.

Finally, adding a bit of commercial luster to the artistic endeavor, he stationed himself at a table near the exit to sign autographs--preferably on recordings--as the fans retreated downhill to the parking lots. Enterprising fellow.

Spano and the orchestra accompanied the stellar soloist crisply and discreetly. Any impetus for passion emanated from the keyboard, however, not the podium.

The evening had begun, significantly, with an unusually phlegmatic “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (Perhaps someone will tell us before next summer why the patriotic exercise is de rigueur at every alfresco concert.) The anthem was followed by an unusually metronomic performance of the overture to Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.”

Spano’s big moment came, and went, with the lush gushing and mock-exotic meandering of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” The performance tended toward the pedantic. It was clean, somewhat sluggish and ultimately a bit dull. At least it wasn’t bombastic beyond the call.

Alexander Treger played the incidental violin solos exquisitely.