AT 28, LITTON’S A VETERAN OUTDOORSMAN

Reached at his London hotel just after one midnight last week, Andrew Litton has just returned from a nine-hour recording session with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra spent on Mahler’s First Symphony. He sounds a bit tired.

“I’m not sure I will make any sense,” says the 28-year-old American conductor, who leads concerts at Hollywood Bowl this coming weekend and the week of July 21, “but fire away.”

Litton, a native New Yorker formerly associated with the National Symphony in Washington, seems to have spent more time in England than in his native country in the five years since winning the BBC Young Conductor’s Competition. In the 1986-87 season, he served as principal guest conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony and took the English Chamber Orchestra on its U.S. tour last fall.

In 1987-88, he will again tour with the ECO (this time to France) and will be a podium guest in Paris, Rotterdam, Utah and, again, with both the Royal and London philharmonics in England. His only regret is that this season will take him into no opera houses.

“That’s the only thing that bothers me, because I adore opera. I grew up with it--my godfather was the principal timpanist of the Metropolitan (Opera) Orchestra, and I spent a lot of time in that pit.”

Nor is the young American musician a stranger to outdoor concerts. He will bring to his Hollywood Bowl appearances Friday and Saturday (when his soloists are singer Teri Ralston and pianist/vocalist Michael Feinstein--and the program Gershwin) experience at the White House Lawn concerts of the National Symphony at Wolf Trap and at the Spoleto Festival in Italy.

“I’ve paid my dues outdoors,” says Litton.

Though he is principal guest conductor in Bournemouth, Litton makes his home in Virginia; his wife is harpist with the National Symphony. What he misses most, he says, in the apparently endless rounds of traveling between podiums, is playing the piano. “Right now there is no time, and it’s frustrating.”

MORE AT THE BOWL: Before Litton, Ralston and Feinstein join the Los Angeles Philharmonic next Friday for Gershwin, the orchestra will be working under the ministrations of the young Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer. Tuesday, with Stephen Hough as the piano soloist, Fischer will lead the Philharmonic in a program comprising Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, the Piano Concerto No. 3 by Prokofiev and Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony.

Thursday, when Alicia de Larrocha returns to the Bowl to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C, K. 467, and Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain,” the program will also include Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri” Overture and Ravel’s Suite No. 2 from “Daphnis et Chloe.”

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING: When is a Boston Pops not a Boston Pops? When it’s the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, the ensemble due at Hollywood Bowl next Sunday. The Esplanade group (named for the outdoor band shell next to the Charles River) consists of free-lance musicians from the Boston area. During the summer, the orchestra is formed while the Boston Symphony--which, minus first-desk players, concertizes and records as the beloved Boston Pops--resides at Tanglewood.

The Sunday Calendar ad by the sponsoring Los Angeles Philharmonic bills the nearly sold-out program next weekend as “John Williams and THE BOSTON POPS.” Down below in small print, the “Esplanade” appears, but, of course, no explanation is given.

BRIEFLY: Noting the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Carmel Bach Festival, a celebration opens the 50th edition of the festival Monday night in the parking lot around Sunset Center in the Northern California community. A plaque commemorating the two founders of the festival, Denny and Hazel Watrous, will be presented to the City of Carmel--later to be installed in the center lobby. At the same time, original members of the brass choir who opened the first festival, in 1935--during World War II, the festival suspended operation for three summers in the 1940s--will play, heralding the 50th festival.

The Pacific Symphony of Orange County will play at the festivities for the Los Angeles visit by Pope John Paul II Sept. 15 in the Coliseum.

Two dance companies appear at Redlands Bowl this week. Tuesday night at 8:15, it is Floricanto Dance Theatre, the 30-member troupe with a repertory of dances from 17 different states of Mexico. Friday, also at 8:15, it’s the San Francisco Bay area-based Peninsula Ballet Theatre led by Anne Bena. The company will dance a program concluding with excerpts from Tom Pazik’s “Cinderella.”