HOCKNEY'S BRUSH WITH WAGNER.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

For artist David Hockney, the path to an enchanted medieval lair began, in a sense, with a scrubby stretch of California asphalt.

Slicing northwest through the Antelope Valley, Route 138 kisses the edge of the Angeles National Forest as it speeds by the vanished lakes of the desert. It frames a landscape as harsh and inhuman as any in Norse legend, and its eerily beautiful surroundings echo its fairy-tale name: Pearblossom Highway.

Instantly recognizable to many Southern Californians, as well as to modern art aficionados, ``Pearblossom Highway'' also is the name of a landmark photo collage Hockney made in 1986. Assembled from hundreds of individual shots, ``Pearblossom Highway'' explodes the Renaissance ideal of a single, omniscient visual perspective. Strewn with cactuses, empty beer bottles and spent motor oil cans, the picture's fly's-eye vision underscores the vast uncontainability of nature and alludes to the wretched excesses of human desire.

``Pearblossom Highway'' may be far from the minds of the glitterati who'll gather Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the first of seven performances of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera production of Richard Wagner's tragic opera, ``Tristan und Isolde,'' which the L.A.-based Hockney conceived, directed and designed.

Yet the L.A. Opera revival, first mounted in 1987 with Hockney's sets and Jonathan Miller directing, might look very different if not for the British-born painter's fateful trek down Route 138 a decade ago.

Hockney's moody, at times molten-hot color scheme for ``Tristan'' also borrows from the dramatic palette he has used to invest the beaches of Santa Monica and our own San Fernando Valley with near-mythic grandeur. In the months leading up to the 1987 production, he would play ``Tristan'' while weaving through the Santa Monica Mountains, mentally choreographing Wagner's music.

``It's an interesting idea that California's landscapes form the basis of this concept for `Tristan,' and it's probably true,'' says Peter Hemmings, L.A. Opera's erudite general manager.

The 59-year-old artist himself is harder to pin down on the point, not least because he insists on treating Wagner's fever-pitch score - not his own exuberant designs - as the production's soul.

At a Music Center press conference two weeks ago, Hockney gave little reason to suspect that his personal take on ``Tristan'' will swerve widely from Miller's in 1987. Speaking with his usual rumpled elegance, he seemed intent on demystifying his role as auteur.

``I'm not a professional in the theater,'' he says. ``I mean that in a literal sense: I'm not really paid for the amount of time spent on it.

``My attitude to designing is that it's all about the music. I'm not going to impose anything on it. The concept is Richard Wagner's, actually.''

But in his 1993 pictorial memoir, ``That's the Way I See It'' (Chronicle Books), Hockney makes clear that his ``Tristan'' sets were directly inspired by ``Pearblossom Highway's'' technique of somehow fusing hundreds of perspectives into a single ``normal'' one.

``I realized one could maybe do this in space,'' he writes. ``I couldn't make hundreds of perspectives in the sets, on the stage, but I could make quite a few that still looked as if they were one. The effect, I thought, would be to pull the viewer closer into it.''

Hockney's sets express this by arraying themselves at odd, even contradictory angles. For example, the skewed masts and cockeyed sails of the ship, where Act 1 takes place, collapse the distance between viewers and performers. The stage itself is raked at a shockingly steep incline - ``like the mountains in Austria,'' says soprano Renate Behle, who plays the doomed lover Isolde.

Based on a medieval German poem, adapted in turn from a Celtic legend, ``Tristan'' is ruled by towering passions and monumental longings. Somehow, Hockney had to find a visual equivalent to the mystical ecstasy and delirious eroticism that hold sway over much of the score.

For those accustomed to seeing Wagner's operas swathed in Teutonic monochromes, Hockney's splash-happy use of the color spectrum can be a bit like watching a mini Mardi Gras break out at a New Orleans street funeral.

``I think the music is incredibly emotional, that you're meant to absorb it in some quite unintellectual way, actually,'' Hockney asserts. ``That is what makes it fantastic theater. The music will do the work. I think the way it ends, actually, is a marvelous, deep, disturbing pleasure.''

When L.A. Opera produced ``Tristan'' in 1987, the event was treated as a combination of Oscar night, a major art-show opening and a giant debutante ball. The local media whipped up excitement. Corporate sponsor AT&T waggishly touted its support of ``Tristan und Isolde und David (Hockney)'' with national ads in Time magazine. Placido Domingo and Mikhail Baryshnikov were among the A-list opening-night attendees.

Among the cognoscenti, the perception (or at least the wishful thinking) was that L.A.'s once-desolate performing arts scene had finally come of age.

Yet in retrospect, L.A. Opera's Hemmings can't help but marvel at his company's sheer audacity in biting off such a high-profile project at such a tender age. During the intervening decade, there have been only two productions of ``Tristan'' in the whole of the United States, a measure of its excruciating difficulty.

``It's fairly alarming, when I think back on it, that we staged `Tristan' in our second season,'' Hemmings concedes.

Now ``Tristan'' is returning to an older, perhaps less self-conscious opera community, with notably less froth and fanfare, but with the key member of its creative team back for an encore. He'll be aided by a top-flight production squad that includes lighting designer Duane Schuler, chorus master William Vendice, fight choreographer Anthony De Longis and stage director Stephen Pickover, who'll arrange the singers' actual movements to Hockney's specifications.

The entirely new cast stars Behle and heldentenor Siegfried Jerusalem as the insatiable paramours. Los Angeles native Jane Henschel, an accomplished Wagnerian, plays Isolde's faithful servant, Brangane. Sir Donald McIntyre, the dean of the Wagnerian bass-baritone fraternity, makes his L.A. Opera debut as King Marke, the Cornish ruler whose summoning of Isolde to be his bride sets the star-crossed tragedy in motion.

Down in the pit, Richard Armstrong, currently music director of the Scottish National Opera, will inherit the baton from former L.A. Philharmonic music director Zubin Mehta.

With so many new faces about, top billing still belongs to Hockney's sets and costumes. For at least some members of the black-tie audience, it will be the visual wit and invention, not merely the musical Sturm und Drang, that will justify the $130 top ticket price.

Unlike some of the eight other opera productions that Hockney has designed - including ``Turandot,'' ``The Rake's Progress'' and ``The Magic Flute'' - the superhuman, metaphysical dimensions of ``Tristan'' make it tough to translate into some hip, modern context. Hockney quips that ``there are no L.A. cops in this production,'' which pleases singer Henschel immensely.

``I think doing Tristan and Isolde as a janitor and a cleaning lady just doesn't work, or doesn't work for me,'' she says. ``Maybe I'm conservative.''

However ``Tristan'' is done, or redone, it's always something of a breakthrough for an opera company to produce, says Sir Donald McIntyre. If it's not done well, ``it's a disaster,'' he says. If it is, it's ``perhaps the most exciting, even shattering experience you can have in the theater.''

``The first time I saw `Tristan,' it was a very conservative production, and I thought it was the biggest load of codswallop I'd ever seen,'' he says.

Years later, a radical performance in Bayreuth, Germany, prompted an epiphany.

``It was just a really unbelievable production,'' says Sir Donald. ``Days later, thinking about it, I would find myself weeping. I've never really recovered from it.''

Between now and Feb. 18, all roads to Wagnerian catharsis will go through downtown L.A.

THE FACTS

What: The Los Angeles Music Center Opera presents Richard Wagner's ``Tristan und Isolde,'' in a production conceived, directed and designed by David Hockney.

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

When: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and Feb. 4, 7, 12, 15, 18; and 12:30 p.m. Feb. 1

Tickets: $23 to $130. Call [phone].

Running time: Five hours, 15 minutes; two intermissions.

CAPTION(S):

6 Photos

Photo: (1--2--Cover--Color) GRAND DESIGNS

Artist David Hockney brings his colorful vision to L.A. Opera's `Tristan und Isolde'

(3--Color) David Hockney, the designer behind the Los Angeles Music Center Opera's 1987 mounting of ``Tristan und Isolde,'' takes over directing chores in the 1997 production.

Joe Binoya/Special to the Daily News

(4--Color) ``My attitude to designing is that it's all about the music. I'm not going to impose anything on it,'' says Hockney, who came up with ideas by listening to ``Tristan'' while driving through the Santa Monica Mountains.

(5--Color) Hockney's design sheds the Teutonic monochromes common to many Wagner productions in favor of bold colors.

(6--Color) Hockney says his 1986 photo collage, ``Pearblossom Highway'' (a portion of which is shown above), in which hundreds of perspectives are fused into a single one, inspired his work on the sets for the L.A. Opera's ``Tristan.''