Music Preview: Pasadena Pops principal conductor Michael Feinstein’s skills have grown by ‘leaps and bounds’

When the passing of famed composer Marvin Hamlisch in 2012 left the Pasadena Pops orchestra without its lead conductor, the organization tapped Michael Feinstein, Hamlisch’s fellow champion of the wealth of early- to mid-20th-century popular music that defines the Great American Songbook.

Although concerned about his then-fledgling status as a conductor, Feinstein was “gobsmacked” to be asked (as he put it at the time), signing on as Principal Pops Conductor for a one-year term, to end in 2013.

Before the year was over, his contract had been extended through 2016. It’s no small measure of Feinstein’s success that the opening of the Pops outdoor summer season this Saturday at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden was preceded by the announcement that his tenure with the Pops will now continue through 2019.

New York-based musical archivist, educator and multiplatinum recording artist Feinstein could hardly be busier. A partial list: In addition to periodic TV specials, his educational Great American Songbook Foundation, and a national and international touring schedule, Feinstein is artistic director of both the Palladium Center for the Performing Arts in Indiana and Carnegie Hall’s “Standard Time with Michael Feinstein.” He is director of the Jazz and Popular Song Series at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and in 2014, he began conducting a Pops series at Florida’s Kravis Center for the Performing Arts.

Feinstein’s reason for re-upping with the Pasadena Pops is simple.

“I love doing it and I love the challenge,” he said. “Every time I put together a new concert, I learn so much and I discover more music. It’s been a constant, joyful discovery of musical riches.”

Feinstein will be directly involved in four of the five Pops season offerings. Saturday’s kickoff, with Feinstein conducting, is “First Ladies of Song: Music from Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney & Peggy Lee,” with Tony-winner Cady Huffman, noted swing vocalist Lynn Roberts, and newcomer Madelyn Baillio, a winning alum of Feinstein’s intensive “Great American Songbook Academy” project, who has just been cast as the lead in NBC’s upcoming presentation of “Hairspray Live!”

Baillio served as the Songbook Academy’s “Youth Ambassador” two years ago “when she was just 17,” Feinstein said. “She’s an incredible talent and I feel very proud that I helped discover her.”

A last-minute addition to the evening’s rare offerings: “I found a chart that Rosemary [Clooney] sang on TV once in 1956 of a song called ‘Mangoes,’” Feinstein said.

After a tribute to “The Music of Billy Joel” on July 9 with “Movin’ Out” singer/pianist Michael Cavanaugh and conductor Larry Blank, Feinstein returns July 30 as soloist in the second installment of his Grammy-nominated “Sinatra Project.”

Conducted by Blank, the evening will touch on every period of Frank Sinatra’s career, Feinstein said. In addition to “a lot of swing things, a couple of vintage Nelson Riddle charts” and a performance of ‘The Birth of the Blues’ in commemoration of the famous duet that Sinatra did with Louis Armstrong,” Feinstein said, he will be presenting a number of arrangements “that are unique.” These include “what might have been” arrangements and this first: the full orchestration of “Three Coins in a Fountain,” only half of which was sung by Sinatra in the 20th Century Fox film of the same name. “It’s a majestic symphonic arrangement,” Feinstein said.

He will pick up the baton again for “Cole Porter Night” on Aug. 20 (with soloists Catherine Russell and Nick Ziobro) and for the season closer, “A Salute to Warner Bros.” on Sept. 10 (featuring “42nd Street,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” film scores by Max Steiner, music from “Gypsy” and “The Music Man” and more.)

Feinstein, whose painstaking search for original charts and orchestrations to restore and reinterpret could be characterized as musical “dumpster diving” at times, enjoys giving the orchestra and audiences something they have never heard before, as he combines, for instance, a swing chart by Nelson Riddle with classic works by such major film orchestrators as Conrad Salinger or Herbert Spencer “into one whole that will be appropriate for the scene and also give people a very wide musical experience.”

“We certainly have commercial elements in all of our programming,” said Lora Unger, CEO of the Pasadena Symphony and Pops. But Feinstein, who can make “5,000 people feel like we’re all sitting around his piano in his home,” she said, “has this gift of presenting music that is new to your ear in a way that it seems immediately familiar and relevant and fun and popular.”

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Many of Feinstein’s arrangements will be heard only at Pasadena Pops concerts. What his tenure has meant to the Pops, Unger said, “is that we now have a special niche here in the Southern California market, let alone the country. There’s no other orchestra that is specifically focusing its resources on this artistic vision.”

That fledgling conductor status, by the way, no longer applies.

As the Pops principal conductor now for four years, Feinstein — who engages audiences further by placing each piece of music into an entertaining and informative context — has grown artistically “by leaps and bounds,” Unger said. On-the-job training “is the nature of learning conducting. You get better at it only by doing.”

The experience has been “like a flower unfolding,” Feinstein said. “More and more joy has come from going deeper with the music and having the experience of choosing an arrangement, being able to play it, and hear it realized.”

And when it comes to the Pasadena Pops orchestra, he said, “it is an honor to work with musicians of such incredible talent and kindness. I don’t take it for granted.”

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What: Pasadena Pops “2016 Sierra Auto Summer Concert Series”

Where: Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, 301 N. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia.

When: Saturday. June 18: “First Ladies of Song: Music From Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney & Peggy Lee.” July 9: “Music of Billy Joel.” July 30: “Sinatra Project, Volume 2.” Aug. 20: “Cole Porter Night.” Sept. 10: “A Salute to Warner Bros.” Grounds open for picnicking and dining at 5:30 p.m.; performances begin at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: Single tickets start at $25. Free parking at the adjacent Westfield Santa Anita shopping center with shuttle service.

More info: (626) 793-7172, pasadenasymphony-pops.org

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LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.