Reel Music

After years of trying to find a way to induce Hollywood downtown, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has finally found one. And sure enough Thursday night a whole new audience made a rare foray to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on a night when no Oscars were awarded.

The Hollywood elite--calling attention to itself by entering through VIP doors, wearing jackets with film logos and super-short skirts, flashing face lifts and cigars--came to cheer its own. They came for Filmharmonic. They came because the orchestra has decided to allow commercial filmmakers and film composers a chance to work outside commerce, exploring the possibilities of combining film and live music. Esa-Pekka Salonen has described the effort as a kind of concerto for movie screen and orchestra.

The first step in this process is “1001 Nights” and ostensibly less Hollywood than later efforts promise to be. The music is by a studio familiar, David Newman, who this year received an Academy Award nomination for his score to the animated feature “Anastasia.” But the film itself is a collaboration between two Japanese artists, illustrator Yoshitaka Amano and computer graphics animator Noriaki Kaneko, and a British director, Mike Smith, best known for music videos.

The timing of this project is fascinating. In the last two weeks we have had the premiere of “Monsters of Grace,” a Philip

Glass-Robert Wilson opera to animated 3-D film that also had its original impetus in the “Arabian Nights,” although the poetry of Rumi was ultimately used instead. Simultaneously, the Philharmonic has been exploring the extraordinary orchestral and choral music of Gyorgy Ligeti that Stanley Kubrick used with such imagination in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the film that is also in the news for having just celebrated its 30th birthday.

But, in fact, “1001 Nights” has little in common with either, nor with the many other attempts that have been made in recent years to combine live orchestral music with film (including John Cage’s late large orchestra work, “103,” written to be performed along with an abstract film) or with the work of some of the more venturesome current composer-filmmaker teams, such as Glass and Martin Scorsese (“Kundun”) or Peter Greenaway and Louis Andriessen (“M Is for Man, Music and Mozart”).

*

Despite its unmistakable look of Japanese animation, “1001 Nights” is slick Hollywood. Unlike the artless animation of “Monsters of Grace,” this painterly 23-minute cartoon has a vivid look, even with a screen suspended over a lit orchestra (which really did give the whole thing the feeling of concerto for movie screen and orchestra). But there was little sense of the independent worthiness of film or music, which is what really makes these other collaborations much more daring explorations into a new kind of art.

Amano’s images look like advertising. They have a bland retrograde quality to them, although the animation is involving, what with Picasso-style line drawings morphing into the tackier side of Chagall morphing into “Yellow Submarine” psychedelia. Newman uses his vast resources (an orchestra puffed up with giant Japanese drums, Korean gongs and a variety of electronic instruments and sampling keyboards) with confidence but mostly to make the fairly predictable sounds of the cineplex. Moreover, music here serves to underscore action in all the obvious ways (battle music for battle scenes, slurpy love music for the R-rated renderings of lovemaking). Anything but new, “1001 Nights” is conceptually light-years behind “2001,” “103” and even “Monsters.”

Actually the real value of the evening came in the long first half, when the Philharmonic demonstrated to its new listeners just how exciting this orchestra can be under Salonen when doing its own thing. The program was mixed and made little sense, other than all the composers have been embraced by filmmakers in soundtracks. John Adams’ slightly outrageous “Slonimsky’s Earbox,” a riot of scales and chord patterns in the splashiest of orchestrations, sounded quirky when the composer conducted it here last year. Salonen made it explode.

The neo-Romantic bittersweet quality of Samuel Barber’s music, the envy of film composers for decades, was represented by his 1945 Cello Concerto with the Philharmonic’s principal cellist, Ronald Leonard, as soloist. This is not music closely associated with Salonen’s more modernist tastes, nor are Barber’s big Romantic-style raptures best suited to Leonard’s suave, understated tone. Although the solo cello did not stand out as much as it might, the performance had a rare elegance and proved a wonderful object lesson in how to keep a composer with a tendency to cloy from doing so.

Also atypical was Salonen’s approach to Tchaikovsky. In the tone poem “Francesca da Rimini,” he looked at the Russian Romantic the way Stravinsky did and practically no one else does, as leaning toward the 20th century. Instead of milking a rich, soulful deep bass sound so typical of the Russian style, Salonen’s performance was brash, splashy, percussive, rhythmically exciting and impressively focused. He did, however, loosen up in the central section of love music and the winds, in particular, used that freedom for some gorgeously effusive playing. Dante was made vivid, even without all those extra watts added to the orchestra or cartoons employed to tell a story.

* The Los Angeles Philharmonic repeats this program tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m., $6-$63, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 850-2000.