On a sultry spring day, few things can be more depressing than having to sit stiffly through the elephantine moods of Brahms or Bruckner; nothing can be more dismal than an evening of Hindemith, or a session with Prokolieff's latest cello sonats. The kind of music one dismisses as superficial in the winter becomes a treat to drowsy summer appetites, while the type of concert-going invited by cold weather becomes absolutely intolerable as the thermometer this eighty-ish. The problem of giving light music comfortably and informally is solved around Boston in a variety of ways.

One way is the Boston Pops Concerts, which, under Mr. Fiedler's lively baton, carries on nightly with overtures, semi-classical favorites, and light tone-poems. The audience listens lightly and lolls around tables guzzling beers. Tonight Mr. Fiedler's gentleman present their standard gourmand's fare. Music like Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," interesting harmonically but otherwise dull, the Brahms Fifth Hungarian Dance, and the unbreakable Blue Danube Waltz, are there for those who can still bear them. Of greater relish is the delightful fantasy "Fugue and Variations on Under the Spreading Chestnut-Tree" by Weinberger, one of the sensations of the past season. The ubiquitous Russians Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff are represented by the magnificent coronation scene from "Boris Godunoff," a rarity even on mid-winder programs, and the Wedding March from "Coq d'Or," a typically pleasant example of Rimsky's slick, brilliant orchestration and excessive lushness. Perhaps the solidest thing on the program is the Overture to the "Marriage of Figaro," which in its five short minutes encompasses the comedy spirit of all time.

Top honors for hot-weather music, however, go to the Harvard Glee Club, which on the steps of Widener sings stuff that is entertaining without being hackneyed, and light without degenerating into dinner-music, as happens so often at the Pops. Tonight's concert is garnered from a far broader range than most serious programs. From Elizabethan England comes a church liturgy by Byrd, full of wonderful organ effects and harmonic coloring. The secular spirit of the same age finds expression in a Morley madrigal, which has the fresh lyrical flavor one associates with Shakespeare's songs. Conventional seventeenth-century numbers are the choruses from "Croesus" and "Prinz Jodelet," by Reinhardt Keiser, but they are energetic and tuneful--and for modern ears, unusual. Finishing off with the boisterous drunkards' chorus from Moussorgsky's "Kovantschina," and the sparkling finale of the "Gondoliers," the program leaves the listener, relaxed on the grass, in a peasant frame of mind--or more so, than would Rossini's Petite Messe Solonelle, a Frescobaldi motet, or the Mahler "Resurrection" Symphony.