Anonymous Celebrity : L.A. Chamber Orchestra concertmaster quietly scales the heights to fame in a freeway mural

Every day, he stares out at 350,000 people--and they glance back. At 80 feet high and covering nine stories, he’s inescapable to drivers passing from the Santa Monica to the Harbor freeways at the downtown interchange.

But few motorists have any idea whose likeness this is: the somberly handsome man in goatee and white tie. Only that he’s a violinist, as evidenced by the Joseph Guarnerius instrument in his reposeful hands.

Call Ralph Morrison the anonymous celebrity--one who has stirred much curiosity in the 18 months that his portrait, as a mural, has adorned the wall of a parking structure just off the 6th Street exit.

Do not, however, think that any of this stardom has been easy for him. After all, although he is concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, it’s uncommon for a musician who is but one member of a large collective to find himself singled out and put in full view to the hordes.

“In fact,” says Morrison, who plays a solo assignment Friday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, “I’m lucky to live in Hollywood. Because it means I seldom use that freeway and seldom have to confront the thing.”

He recalls being in a traffic jam once “and stuck right there, where it seemed so big that all I wanted to do was get away.”

But at first, the scale of the mural, reputed to be the largest hand-painted portrait in the world, allowed him to put distance between it and himself.

“I remember tuning in to the TV news just after it was completed,” he says, “and having an out-of-body experience. The commentator kept referring to ‘the Morrison head,’ so it was easy to feel that he was not talking about me.

“And yet friends I haven’t spoken to in several years call and say, ‘Wow. I almost went off the road seeing you on that building.’ ”

The mural project of which Morrison is the key figure has been dubbed “Harbor Freeway Overture.” First violinist Julie Gigante has now been added, and by May, nine more musicians’ portraits will join them for the delectation of freeway motorists. By the time it is complete, the mural will cover 11,000 square feet, having taken at least 5,000 hours of work and more than 500 gallons of paint.

It all began during a Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra board meeting when one member, trying to suggest a way to give the ensemble publicity, said: ‘Too bad we don’t know the muralist Kent Twitchell. He could put us on some building.”

As it turned out one member actually was friends with the painter, and within a few days a contract between the orchestra and Twitchell, an ardent classical-music fan, had been finalized.

“I wanted to make the concertmaster the central figure,” Twitchell says, “because of a long-standing fascination of mine with these lieutenants, who are the soul of an orchestra. And after seeing Ralph Morrison, I had no reason to look further. He fit my image perfectly.”

The image--that of a virtuoso, someone properly serious and authoritative without seeming pretentious or flamboyant--is altogether different from the one Morrison suggests off-duty.

When he ambles onstage for a rehearsal, one is struck with his easygoing informality. He wears a Hawaiian shirt, jeans and sneakers. He smiles impishly, waves a hello to someone out front and, at 34, seems the picture of youthful bonhomie.

So has instant celebrity, albeit nameless, changed his life?

“Afraid not,” he says at lunch, pouring herbal tea through an aluminum strainer. “It is just one more adventure of sorts.”

Morrison is referring to a career that began in childhood and has taken many turns since then. At 11, he joined a touring production of “Mame,” playing the title character’s nephew.

But this was a family that basically stayed together by playing chamber music together. And when Morrison left Weston, Mass., to matriculate at Columbia University and earn a degree there in literature, he did not leave music off the list.

In fact, throughout his senior year, he could be found eight times a week in the orchestra pit of a Broadway show (“just for the money”) and, as if that were not enough, the versatile performer also founded a Baroque quartet--all this while logging hours as a dormitory resident counselor.

Upon graduation he “took the money and ran,” bought a car and an electric violin, sold everything that wouldn’t fit in and went west, as did many another young man, the idea being to get into the Los Angeles record business.

“I wanted to make new music,” he says, “maybe even a cross-over type, as opposed to re-creating the standard classical repertory. But all that changed when a friend took me to hear the L.A. Chamber Orchestra.

“My response was: Wow!”

Six months later, in November, 1980, Morrison started subbing with the ensemble. And in 1982, when the last chair in the second violins opened, he auditioned for the spot and was chosen by then-director Gerard Schwarz. He climbed quickly up in the ranks and in 1988 was named concertmaster.

But the pattern of Morrison’s life has not changed; he still crams a wide variety of things into his waking hours, all of which practically need a computer to juggle. There are about 50 LACO concerts per season, roughly 35 performances in the Music Center Opera orchestra pit, and studio work by day, which he must fit around rehearsals.

One constant, though, is the mural--which has become a gauge of sorts for him. “I get to age, and it stays the same,” he says wistfully. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll go into politics someday, or open a coffeehouse, and it will be there to remind me of my life now. Maybe it will even show up in the background of a movie’s chase scene.

“But one thing is for sure--I won’t be escaping posterity.”

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra plays at 8 p.m. Friday at Royce Hall, UCLA. Tickets $34 to $9. Call (301) 825-2101.