L.A. Phil and Dirty Projectors

The idea of pairing rock bands with symphony orchestras has a long history and brings to mind such iconic collaborations as the London Philharmonic playing the Who’s “Tommy” or Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” In most cases, stately orchestras reach out to touch pop through the music of megastars such as the Beatles or Elton John.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, however, has taken a different approach to collaboration, and it will revisit indie ground Saturday when it invites the Brooklyn-based experimental group Dirty Projectors to Walt Disney Concert Hall. The orchestra worked similarly with indie group Grizzly Bear in 2008.

Despite their grungy name, Dirty Projectors do not make particularly filthy or unkempt work. Rather, their music is highly structured and complex and has a sensibility that the Phil thought would work well with the orchestra.

Dirty Projectors are “incredibly special and unusual and unpredictable,” said Johanna Rees, senior programming manager for the Philharmonic. “Creatively, there is a refined sense of musicality that is really refreshing.”

“The Getty Address,” a 2005 release from Dirty Projectors to be performed in its entirety Saturday, is an intricate concept album that credits more than 25 musicians and weaves a pastiche of sounds into compelling songs.

“While I was making it, it was a lot about just sound and little pieces of sound, arranging them like a collection of pressed flowers,” said bandleader Dave Longstreth.

For “The Getty Address,” Longstreth named Austrian composer György Sándor Ligeti (whose work has enjoyed mainstream exposure in such films as “Eyes Wide Shut” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”) among his influences, and that helped shape the programming for the first half of Saturday’s concert.

The two groups will not play together. In the first half, the Philharmonic will play works from Ligeti as well as French Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel and German composer Richard Wagner (who is also being celebrated by the L.A. Opera this year).

These selections complement the second half of the program, when Dirty Projectors take the stage to perform “The Getty Address.” The evening has been carefully designed to integrate the separate performances into a musical whole, said Chad Smith, vice president of artistic planning for the Philharmonic.

Smith used themes and structures from Dirty Projectors’ album to help focus the program. For example, one of the Philharmonic’s selections is Ravel’s “Suite to Mother Goose.”

“The Mother Goose stories, like ‘Getty Address,’ is a series of vignettes that tell a musical narrative,” Smith said.

Smith and Longstreth went back and forth over a period of months, discussing and tweaking the exact pieces to be performed until, Smith said, the Phil’s half of the program became like the “sound world” of the Projectors’ half. They had to have some sonic kinship.

During their segment, Dirty Projectors will perform with guests Alarm Will Sound, a chamber ensemble Longstreth recruited from New York, and will finish off the evening with selections from their newest album, “Bitte Orca” (2009).

For his part, Longstreth said he dug through his own musical history to find something that would be appropriate to the space of Disney Hall and finally settled on “The Getty Address.” “It was refreshing to revisit this album,” he said.

Will the collaboration work as either classical music or pop?

“That is what’s really interesting -- trying to find those connections between what we do and what they do,” said Rees

samantha.page @latimes.com