CULTURE MEETS COMMERCE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

The brochure announcement read thus: `On April 15, 1998, theater as we know it will shed its skin and enter an exciting and bold new era!''

Holy hyperbole! That was the promotional plug (exclamation point included) for the UCLA Performing Arts Center's recent world premiere of ``Monsters of Grace 1.0,'' a ``3-D opera'' staged and designed by Robert Wilson with music by Philip Glass.

Pretty heady expectations - and why not? ``Monsters of Grace'' promised to combine theme-park technology, courtesy of Hollywood computer graphics firm Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co., with stagecraft by one of the world's leading avant-garde innovators and music by one of its most influential composers. In a year when Disney has colonized 42nd Street, and Spike Lee's latest film, ``He Got Game,'' samples composer Aaron Copland, ``Monsters'' was laying yet another bridge across the ever-narrowing gulf between mass and high culture.

Coincidentally, last week Los Angeles played host to another high-profile crossover project, the debut of the L.A. Philharmonic's ``Filmharmonic'' series of original short symphonic pieces set to film. The initial offering, ``1001 Nights,'' paired veteran Hollywood composer David Newman with Japanese animator-artist Yoshitaka Amano, who created a condensed, vaguely Freudian reading of the Arabic epic.

Different as they are, both projects represent a potentially significant shift in L.A.'s usual way of doing cultural business. It's well-known that Hollywood has long been estranged from the city's major cultural players and that over the years the arts establishment has tried various ways to plead, threaten and cajole the studios into supporting them.

But in reaching out to Hollywood with the ``Filmharmonic'' project, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonic's music director, isn't simply making a cynical pitch for Hollywood mega-bucks. His idea is to free the imaginations of composers and filmmakers alike from the usual studio constraints of earning $20 million in opening-weekend grosses. That process will take time.

Similarly, the unique funding arrangement that made ``Monsters of Grace'' possible - 10 institutions co-commissioned the project, including UCLA, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and London's Barbican Centre - gave two proven artists, who probably earn less combined than James Cameron's press agent, a chance to experiment with technology that otherwise would be way beyond their reach.

What were the results?

Measured by the technical standards of this visually hyper-sophisticated city, the debut of ``Monsters'' at Royce Hall was, admittedly, disappointing. The 3-D glasses issued to audience members drove home the point that, despite its futuristic ambitions, ``Monsters'' for the most part looks decidedly retro. Of Wilson's 13 vignettes, only eight were fully animated as 3-D holograms; the rest were staged with live actors. Of the animated sequences, only a couple achieved the level of sublime visual poetry we've come to associate with Wilson.

Yet, surely, art is about more than just point-and-click instant gratification. With its elliptical, slow-moving imagery, ``Monsters'' invites a less frenetic, more contemplative relationship with technology. And it contains some of the most exquisitely humane and beautiful music Philip Glass has ever written, set to the poetry of the 13th-century Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi.

``Filmharmonic'' fared better. Working with Glendale-based Hyperion Studios, Newman and Amano produced a 23-minute psychological parable, notable for some stunning computer-generated depictions of 3-D fairy-tale landscapes. Amano mixes willowy, art-nouveau figures with commercial Japanese cartoon animation, resulting in a pleasant synthesis, though certainly not an artistic breakthrough - at least not yet. Newman's richly textured music made interesting use of sampled Middle Eastern instruments and other sounds but seemed hemmed in by the story's simplistic emotional dynamics.

So what do we have? Two interesting, courageous experiments, one (``Filmharmonic'') faulted for being too commercial, the other perhaps for not being commercial enough.

Yet, just as important as the results was the fact that these collaborations took place here in the world's mass-culture capital. Maybe the goal of such ventures needn't be to create a new art form (as ``Filmharmonic'' bills itself) or to end ``theater as we know it,'' but simply to let artists and entertainers of all stripes know that L.A. is a place where innovation is welcome and genuine talent is nurtured.

Neither Hollywood nor Beethoven's Ninth Symphony were created in a day. Let's hope Angelenos will have the patience to let these new concepts-in-progress slowly take root, while outsiders begin to see L.A. as a place where different cultural camps can learn to get along.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) The ``Filmharmonic'' debut, ``1001 Nights,'' paired Hollywood composer David Newman with Japanese animator-artist Yoshitaka Amano.

(2) Robert Wilson, left, and Philip Glass embrace new technology in ``Monsters of Grace 1.0,'' billed as a ``3-D opera.''