Sounds good, yet ...

Frank Gehry’s extraordinary Walt Disney Concert Hall is the most highly anticipated new orchestra home since Hans Scharoun designed the Philharmonie for the Berlin Philharmonic 40 years ago. That it will become a tourist attraction, a focal point for the redevelopment of downtown, a fresh emblem for Los Angeles, is more than likely. That its opening will attract a huge amount of international attention is inevitable. And first impressions count.

But second impressions mean more. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s inaugural season in Disney Hall is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the orchestra to bask in the Gehry limelight, and it clearly intends to do so. For its opening Disney Hall concerts in October, the Philharmonic has capitalized on many of its strengths, and it has learned from the mistakes that have plagued other hall openings.

More important, it has also announced an admirably ambitious season, overflowing with big-name conductors and big-name soloists. We can look forward to a stream of world premieres, innovative educational programs, an array of Baroque and new-music offerings, along with a series of panels and symposia. In addition, the Philharmonic programmers have come up with novel thematic threads to help tie it together.

Since the 2,265-seat new hall is a third smaller than the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Philharmonic’s home since 1964, the orchestra will add a full 50% more concerts. Yet so impressive is the depth of the programming and the quality of the performers that every orchestra program next season can be recommended without hesitation. While the hall is a novelty, the Philharmonic audience will be enormously bolstered by gawking looky-loos who might not otherwise attend an orchestral concert. That is a gift the Philharmonic has no intention of squandering.

Still, without wanting to seem curmudgeonly in the face of such lavish and intelligent offerings, and fully prepared for the hall to turn out to be an architectural and acoustical masterpiece -- and maybe one of social planning as well -- I’m not convinced that absolutely everything is right in paradise.

Some doubts started when I was wandering through the aisles of a record store the other day. In conversation with a clerk, I happened to mention that the Philharmonic was about to announce its first Disney Hall season. Suddenly someone walked up to the cash register infuriated. He didn’t want to know anything about Disney Hall. Long a subscriber to the orchestra, supporting it through thick and thin in the Pavilion, he won’t be setting foot in its new digs, since the lowest-priced subscription seats will rise from $14 to $35. He said he had come to hate the orchestra and could no longer bear to look at the new hall -- all that expensive steel repulses him. He will buy records instead.

Although I haven’t heard a peep about the top-priced seats rising to $120, I’ve encountered repeated complaints from less-well-heeled Philharmonic faithfuls feeling frozen out. Asked about this, Philharmonic general manager Deborah Borda assured me that single seats, not yet on sale, will be less expensive and that student and senior discounts will continue. She also explained that the ticket prices had been left unreasonably low for so many years that playing catch-up obviously leads to sticker shock.

However, given the opening-season demand the single and discounted seats will surely be hard to come by. And with the pricing strategy, the orchestra has alienated some of the city’s most devoted music lovers, dependent on their weekly Philharmonic fix.

But you’ve got to love the orchestra for making a significant gesture toward children and community workers by inviting them to be the hall’s first official audiences in a series of four preview concerts the week before the big-ticket formal opening galas. The first program will be a kids’ concert, with a new, interactive piece by Tan Dun; next will be programs for the hall’s construction workers, teachers, public employees, social workers.

You might point out that the Philharmonic is cleverly gaining goodwill by using regular folks as guinea pigs. But this really is a win-win situation, in which the orchestra serves the community and builds new audiences, at the same time avoiding the most common pitfall of new halls. It is the embarrassing norm to open halls in which technical kinks are not worked out and performers have not had ample opportunity to adapt to new acoustics, as has been the case in recent years in Seattle, New Jersey and Philadelphia. Happily, the first two Disney Hall galas are designed to really show off what the Philharmonic does best. The third, devoted to film music, may be an eager grab at movie money, but thus far there have been no details of the program other than notice of a new work by John Williams.

Welcome experimentation

The season’s thematic programming -- especially a “creation” festival, a celebration of the bicentennial of Berlioz’s birth and a “building music” project -- all makes sense. The theme of creation allows for a strong one-two “Resurrection”-”Creation” punch, with Mahler’s Second Symphony the first week of the season and Haydn’s oratorio the second. The theme also encompasses the nine world premieres the orchestra will present over the season. Trying out works made for specific buildings -- such as Monteverdi’s “1610” Vespers, intended for St. Mark’s in Venice, and Berlioz’s “Requiem” for Les Invalides in Paris -- should be a fascinating acoustical experiment in this vineyard-style hall with no proscenium stage. And what composer better than Berlioz to test the hall’s ability to project blasts of brilliant instrumental color?

The layout of Disney Hall offers further opportunity to stretch the boundaries of orchestral presentation, and the Philharmonic is trying a couple of welcome experiments. Notably, British theater troupe Complicite will invent a dramatic context for Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” as it did for Shostakovich’s 15th String Quartet in its absorbing “Noises of Time” at UCLA last spring. Opera will get a trial run as well, with a chamber work by Osvaldo Golijov.

Yet, impressive as all this is, the Philharmonic appears almost hypnotized by juggling its many programmatic balls. Keeping all of them in the air is no small feat, and that may be why the orchestra hasn’t dared, at least for this first season, to launch a really big one, to do something truly spectacular. Certainly plenty of big works are on the bill, but nothing stands out as a stupendous statement the way William Bolcom’s cast-of-thousands “Songs of Innocence and Experience” or Golijov’s groundbreaking Latino “Pasion Segun San Marco” do this season at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The West Coast premiere of Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” for three orchestras might have done it. So might have a concert performance of the “Les Troyens” as the centerpiece of the Berlioz celebration. Zubin Mehta, whose first concert in Disney Hall will be Beethoven’s Ninth, conducted the mammoth Berlioz opera with the Chicago Symphony a couple of seasons ago. Think what a statement Marin Alsop might have made if, instead of Barber’s drab First Symphony, she were to conduct Bernstein’s flashy, ever-controversial “Mass,” which she does extremely well.

And not enough of the music signals Disney Hall as a symbol of the West. The Philharmonic hasn’t shunned West Coast music altogether next season. Admirably, the opening galas include Salonen’s “LA Variations” and newly commissioned works by John Adams (“The Dharma at Big Sur”) and John Williams. Salonen has promised a new piece to close the season. But in between, Disney Hall might just as well be in Bilbao.

California pioneers absent

What with Gehry’s architecture serving to reflect the Southland’s physical environment, the Philharmonic is remiss in not doing the same for its cultural environment. The orchestra has added a four-concert world music series to its presentations, inviting stars from around the globe. But absent are the California pioneers -- Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, Terry Riley -- who meld world music with classical music. Nor is there a tip of the hat to Colin McPhee, the first composer to re-created the effects of the Balinese gamelan with a Western orchestra, and a member of the UCLA music department for the last years of his life.

The most glaring omission of all, though, is Henry Brant, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year. Long a resident of Santa Barbara, Brant is the foremost champion of spatial music, which is to say in moving all around the hall. The 90-year-old composer is a character, to boot, and audiences adore him. It is hard to imagine any “building music” festival without him, let alone one in his backyard.

Obviously the orchestra can’t do everything the first year, and there is more than enough to look forward to. Still, it would be nice if Disney Hall’s beautiful shiny steel exterior wasn’t the only thing that mirrored its surroundings, and if the orchestra could find a way to make it a bit easier to let everyone in.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.