The Spaceship Has Landed
Loaded with L.A.'s cultural baggage, Disney Hall offers a unique close encounter of the musical kind
"See the Music."
That's what everyone can do these days - everyone who drives down to First Street and Grand Avenue to gaze at the newly opened Walt Disney Concert Hall. For seeing is believing. And until you actually see this wholly implausible yet amazing edifice, you can't really understand the slogan "See the Music." What happens inside - no matter how grand the actual music-making - cannot equal the sight.
So, clearly, it was correct for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's marketing department to use this catchphrase - in fact, to blanket the city with it for many months. After all, the new music emporium is expected to signify Los Angeles in a way no other structure has. The design has already become an instant icon.
What's more, the clever ad copy can be traced to George Balanchine's famous dictum "hear the dancing, see the music," a turnaround of sight and sound and a testament to the choreographer's achievement.
To underline the point, it's an apt pitch for Frank Gehry's architectural creation because Disney Hall's visuals far outweigh its function. No matter how the long-term appraisals of its acoustics stack up, the physical presence of this citadel will dominate all musical considerations.
Which leads us to the whys and wherefores of building the new house.
Los Angeles, entertainment capital of the world, has long been battling an outworn stereotype: cultural backwater. We are told that Hollywood is and always will be preeminent. According to this worldview, the performing arts exist as mere afterthoughts. Why, we don't even have a ballet company, and the Los Angeles Opera made its belated debut only 17 years ago. By contrast, San Francisco has boasted institutions in all three of these categories for more than half a century. No wonder it scoffs at its neighbor to the south.
Doubtlessly, local billionaires smarted at the status quo. So choosing Gehry - who could promise to do for this city what he did for Bilbao, the site of his Spanish museum - just may have been the real basis of the campaign to build a music hall better than the chandeliered Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
Disney 2 will certainly be a tourist destination (along with the theme park) - even more than the Getty Center, which drew enormous crowds when it opened six years ago but has seen its popularity die down. Still, it remains to be determined whether the hall will become a habit for Westsiders or other Angelenos who have to crawl clogged freeways for up to an hour to cover no more than 12 miles.
Curiously, we didn't start hearing about the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion's "bad" acoustics until the Disney Hall bandwagon got underway. For most of the 16 years that the Disney project languished, not much was said about the orchestra's former home being sonically unhospitable. But in 1996, city leaders and powerful culture mavens intent on making Disney happen took charge - philanthropist Eli Broad, Philharmonic executive director Ernest Fleischmann, and Mayor Richard Riordan among them. And for the past year, criticism of the Pavilion's sound became a mantra hammered home in every Los Angeles Times review.
Branding the orchestra's former home a "disaster," though, was something of a red herring. Certain visiting conductors, such as Zubin Mehta, the Philharmonic's music director from 1962 to 1978, had no trouble getting the orchestra to play there with rich, full-bodied sound.
But Disney Hall is here now, for all to admire or not. And it cannot be said too often that the sight is worth a thousand notes: a big swirling spaceship of stainless steel with its curvilinear sail at full mast, its surfaces gleaming and changing color as the sunlight plays on them. It's a marvel that perches on Bunker Hill, as though it just landed - commanding attention, seeming unreal and unrelated to its surroundings.
Artist Ed Ruscha views it as "wavy-gravy architecture" and "the flagship signifier for the whole Planet L.A. right there in the bellybutton of the city." Writer Rip Rense, on the other hand, thinks it "looks like half-torn-up cardboard boxes left out in the rain and spray-painted silver." He also points out, mordantly, that the real thing - cardboard boxes converted into sleeping compartments for the homeless - can be found just blocks away.
Still, what many see as media overkill - the Times has devoted several books' worth of ink to covering Disney Hall, and an editor at The New York Times spoke of being "disneyfied" - was easily predictable. When wealthy donors put $274 million into an enterprise that took so many stormy years to accomplish, they also had the impetus to pull corporate-media strings. And there's pan-boosterism at work, buying prestige for the cultural underdog by way of massive coverage. As a result, we know more about the hall's mousetraps - pace Mickey - and every hemidemisemiquaver that went into the planning and acoustics than a sane person might have dreamed possible.
But dreams also are supposed to be democratic - i.e., inclusive of all the people of a city, not just the moneyed elite. Thus, the Philharmonic has pushed up the volume of that very pitch. Just as arts presenters everywhere are, by necessity, broadening their scope to include pop music, jazz, world music, and all-purpose entertainment (as now occurs regularly at the Hollywood Bowl), the Phil has brought a similar thrust to Disney's inaugural season with more concerts, and more varied fare beyond Brahms and Beethoven.
Prior to last week's three opening galas, which were, in effect, celebrity fundraisers ($1,500 to $5,000 per ticket), organizers opened the doors to "select" masses before the official inauguration on October 23. These afternoon samplers, dubbed "Phil the House" concerts, had wide-ranging audiences, including many families bussed in from the barrios. (So there!)
And, except for ticket-price range, there truly are no divisions inside the auditorium. The semicircular stage has seats on all sides, and the Douglas fir that swags from the ceiling and lines the walls makes the interior seem like the hull of a ship, albeit an uncommonly warm and intimate one. Without a proscenium arch, nothing separates the orchestra from the audience. From my garden-level terrace seat at a sampler event, I actually felt like part of the whole musical process. It was possible, for instance, to see percussionist Mitchell Peters damp his drums while holding his red-tipped sticks.
But it was the sense of being incorporated into and enveloped by the music, per se, that made the experience unique. Was the sound always focused or settled? Maybe not. It did have a vivid presence, though, and even seemed to be floating up in a state of perpetual buoyancy.
For these afternoon pre-inaugurals, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen chose Mozart's single-movement 32nd Symphony, enforcing a brisk brightness with his wrist-flipping and ever-fluttering fingers. Then there was Ravel's Bolero, which he revved up with a swooping plangency. And, finally, came the Hollywood moment. In his black Nehru jacket that transformed him into something sleekly elegant, Salonen seized on Stravinsky's volcanic Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring). The cameras should have been rolling, because the man has all the moves; he is a choreographed dream of hard-driven kinesis. The piece, as always, was a wow.
In fact, we could hear the dancing.Published: 10/29/2003
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