What a difference a year makes. At Boston Pops Opening Night 2000, I was down there on the floor, enjoying a discreet glass of wine or two and eating appreciatively around what looked like tenderloin (meat makes this vegetarian critic even more vicious than usual). Flash forward to 2001: exiled to the balcony. Was I in the doghouse for last year’s good-hearted but not flattering review? For my failure to return with last year’s stunning blonde? More likely it was for requesting a ticket way too late. Whatever, I sat there far from the stage (a good 20 empty seats stretching to my left), wine-and-dine-less and hoping the program would provide nourishment for the soul at least.

No luck there, either. In the blessed time of Arthur Fiedler, “Pops” stood for popular classics; these days it means popular music. Keith Lockhart opened the evening with three numbers from the very first (un-air-conditioned) Symphony Hall Pops concert back in May of 1901: Philipp Fahrbach’s Szechenyi March, the Max Zach–Jerome Cohen Harlequin’s Journey, and Chabrier’s Habanera. Then the obligatory young Asian violin virtuoso, in this case 14-year-old Mayuko Kamio, a Juilliard student from Osaka, in Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy; the virtuosity was evident, but she could have had a sweeter tone.

Intermission brought the disconcerting realization that we’d already heard all the classical music on the program. “Comedy Tonight,” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, was followed by special guest John Lithgow in indigo jacket, salmon shirt (I think with French cuffs — I wasn’t close enough to be sure), matching gold (or paisley?) tie and cummerbund, red shoes, and (don’t say the man has no fashion sense) black trousers. “Everybody Eats When They Come to My House,” then the Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare Song from Iolanthe (well done, but he must know a small teddy bear is de rigueur for this number), Allen Sherman’s “You Gotta Have Skin,” his own (with pianist Bill Eliot) “Marsupial Sue,” Flanders & Swan’s “Mud, Glorious Mud,” and, now on the podium, “I’d Rather Lead a Band.” Was this the pops or Sesame Street?

Second intermission, then the well-executed short film “A Tribute to Symphony Hall: The Pops Cheers 100 Years,” in which we got to see how the BSO seats go down the secret elevator and the Pops tables come up. But “Shall We Dance?” (from The King and I), a Jerome Robbins tribute medley, an arrangement of the Drifters hit “On Broadway,” and, of course, “Stars and Stripes Forever” made for an oddly perfunctory dessert.

All this for a mere $135 (Opening Night tickets ranged from $80 to $250). Don’t think I’m anti-Pops: the first LP I ever bought was Fiedler’s Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music. That, however, had actual classical music: the Largo from Dvo<t-75>?<t$>rák’s New World Symphony, the last movement from Rachmaninov’s C-minor piano concerto, the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. So did Opening Night 2000: the first movement of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto and the polonaise from Eugene Onegin, Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Appalachian Spring Suite, along with Ben Vereen singing Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. Listening to Sousa’s piccolo obbligato put me in mind of Tchaikovsky’s F-minor symphony: maybe for Opening Night 2002 Keith and the Pops could try to play the last movement faster than the 7:54 turned in by Yevgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic on their legendary 1960 recording. That would satisfy this critic’s classical cravings and bring the crowd to its feet.