SCORING ONE FOR THE MUSIC; IN NEW `FILMHARMONIC' SERIES, SOUND, VISION SHARE THE BILLING.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

This true confession just in from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion: Esa-Pekka Salonen is a closet Donald Duck freak.

Yes, dear reader, the full story can now be told: As a Finnish schoolboy, the Los Angeles Philharmonic maestro loved to read Donald Duck comic books while listening to classical music, preferably Bruckner's Fourth Symphony.

``For me, somehow, I guess the images mixed with that sound, and I didn't see anything strange in that,'' says the 39-year-old conductor. ``Both were part of our culture: Donald Duck and Bruckner. And both are part of our cultural reality.''

Popular culture and elite culture don't always mix as easily as they did in Salonen's active, 9-year-old imagination.

But they'll intertwine this week at the Music Center of Los Angeles County, when Salonen and his orchestra present the world premiere of ``Filmharmonic,'' a new series of music-film projects that attempts to marry serious entertainment with serious art.

First up is ``1001 Nights,'' a 23-minute work with music by film composer David Newman (``Hoffa,'' ``Anastasia'') and imagery designed by Japanese animator Yoshitaka Amano . Projected in 35mm format, ``1001 Nights'' is a mixed-media piece synthesizing computer animation, cutout animation and traditional painting techniques.

Bellsystem 24, a Japanese marketing services firm, is footing most of the project's $2 million to $3 million budget. All the principal players are lending their talents at no charge, an almost unheard of gesture in Hollywood.

The series will resume this fall with director Renny Harlin (``Cliffhanger'') teaming up with composer Graeme Revell (``The Crow'') on a piece inspired by the life and labors of photographer Peter Beard. Still in the planning and fund-raising stages are collaborations by tunesmith Jerry Goldsmith (``Chinatown'') and director Paul Verhoeven (``Total Recall''), followed by a reunion of Danny Elfman and Tim Burton, the duo who brought you ``Beetlejuice'' and ``Edward Scissorhands.''

Also being commissioned is a piece by Elmer Bernstein (``To Kill a Mockingbird''), the dean of Hollywood composers, paired with an as-yet-unnamed director. Several of the artists involved are clients of Los Angeles-based Kraft-Benjamin talent agency, whose partners Richard Kraft and Lyn Benjamin are producing the series in conjunction with the L.A. Philharmonic.

Forget the finances

For composers and filmmakers, ``Filmharmonic'' offers a rare opportunity to work free of the usual Hollywood pressures of deadlines and bottom lines. For the Philharmonic, it offers a means to explore what Salonen calls ``the middle territory between high art and nonart.''

``In Europe we tend to, traditionally, believe in camps, especially in German-speaking countries,'' says Salonen, now in his sixth season as the L.A. Phil's music director and principal conductor. ``There is the high art, and then there is nothing and nothing and nothing, and then there is entertainment. And there's nothing in between.

``For me, definitely, coming to this part of the world to work changed all of that in my mind. But funnily enough, it took a foreigner at the helm of the Philharmonic to take this step. I think sometimes if you come from the outside, you can see the obvious. It might be harder for people who have grown up in (this) milieu to smell the coffee.''

Salonen also hopes the series will lure younger audiences to the gray-haired environs of the Dorothy Chandler.

``That's one of the subtexts, one of the secret hopes we have, that people who wouldn't come to a Philharmonic concert otherwise would now check it out and see what's going on,'' he says. ``There are lots and lots of people who have their first contact with classical music through film. I remember myself that some of the most powerful encounters (with classical music) I had as a child were indeed through film.''

Strange marriage

Even before Mickey Mouse offered a white glove to Leopold Stokowski in ``Fantasia,'' celluloid and symphonics often have had trouble working hand in hand.

Though the golden age of film-scoring produced many illustrious partnerships - Prokofiev and Sergei Eisenstein (``Alexander Nevsky''), Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock (``Psycho,'' ``Vertigo''), Dimitri Tiomkin and Howard Hawks (``Red River,'' ``Rio Bravo'') - composers generally have been treated as the ``stepchildren'' of the movie industry, Kraft has said. The demands of the Hollywood studio system generally dictated big, stirring emotions over nuance and complexity. Film composers had little room for abstraction or experimentation.

David Newman doubts that his own father, the prolific composer Alfred Newman, would've felt that his classic scores for such movies as ``Wuthering Heights,'' ``How Green Was My Valley'' or ``The Song of Bernadette'' truly reflected his personal vision in the way that a piece composed for a concert hall might.

``If you play the music from `Wuthering Heights,' you're going to see the moors and Merle Oberon,'' Newman says. ``And I'm my father's biggest fan. I think my father was a genius. And I don't quarrel at all with the actual absoluteness of the musical expression, and its validity compared to some other kind of form. But I would say all those guys (film composers) would say that it's not the same.''

Today, composers have even less autonomy. Even those like Newman who command six-figure sums can find scoring to be a mechanized and largely thankless task. Typically, composers are brought in after a film already has been shot. In a few days or weeks they must bang out a soundtrack that matches the director's images virtually frame by frame. Many Hollywood filmmakers don't even bother with full-length scores anymore, preferring hodgepodges of Top 40 hits designed to push preset emotional buttons.

Not so with ``Filmharmonic,'' which treats music and images as separate-but-equal entities that overlap and occasionally even clash.

Collaborative effort

The process for ``1001 Nights'' began with an initial brainstorming and storyboarding session led by director Mike Smith, an animator-designer with Glendale-based Hyperion Studios whose credits include animated sequences in ``Tank Girl'' and ``Natural Born Killers.'' Smith based his storyboards on the elegant, eroticized watercolor illustrations Amano had made for a Japanese translation of the centuries-old Arabic classic.

Newman and Amano then were turned loose to develop their own individual interpretations of the story, with Newman viewing film clips of Amano's images-in-progress as they became available.

``I guess in that sense, you could say it is more like a ballet than a narrative film,'' Amano explains through an interpreter. ``For example, `Swan Lake' works very well choreographically, as well as being wonderful music.''

Smith likens the finished product to an opera - one in which the audience ingests more visual and aural information than it can process at one time.

Newman describes ``1001 Nights'' as a condensed, subtextual reading of the epic legend - ``dare I say, like a Freudian interpretation.'' He describes the new work primarily as a ``music piece,'' in which Amano's animation functions the way a piano or violin soloist might in a symphony.

``We had dialogue back and forth,'' Newman says of their working process, ``but it wasn't like I was saying, `C'mon over and hear this, what do you think?' `I like this but I don't like this.' `Why don't you change this?' There was none of that sort of thing.''

By launching ``Filmharmonic,'' Salonen may help broker a truce between the film industry and the city's old-guard arts establishment. Historically, the mainly Jewish immigrants who invented Hollywood felt snubbed by the WASPy downtown elite that presided over the city's cultural institutions. The arts establishment, in turn, felt Hollywood was turning its back on L.A.'s cultural life.

``I think it's an amazing thing that they (the Philharmonic) have done this,'' says Newman. ``And, in a way, that they've not done it before I think is kind of a shame, because I think there's a lot of talented people, filmmakers and musicians and technical people in Hollywood, that would love to do something like this.''

Salonen says it's essential for an orchestra to be in sync with its hometown's ``folklore.'' In L.A., that means the movies. Salonen already has demonstrated his interest in Hollywood by including works by Goldsmith and John Williams during the Philharmonic's regular season programming. The L.A. Phil also released a popular 1996 CD of classic Bernard Herrmann scores.

For Salonen, ``Filmharmonic'' is the latest step in dismantling the idea that art and entertainment don't go together any more than, well, Donald Duck and Bruckner.

``Good art is often very good entertainment as well. Very good entertainment is quite often art,'' Salonen says. ``Bad art is worthless, and bad entertainment is worthless. So obviously the definitions are slightly theoretical.''

THE FACTS

What: L.A. Philharmonic's world premiere of ``1001 Nights,'' the first installment in the ``Filmharmonic'' series.

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

When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: $6 to $63. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) LIGHTS, CAMERA, BATON

Music and movie get equal billing in new `Filmharmonic' program

(2) Composer David Newman and animator Yoshitaka Amano collaborate in ``1001 Nights,'' which kicks off the ``Filmharmonic'' series.

(3) Projected in 35mm format, ``1001 Nights'' combines computer animation, cutout animation and traditional painting techniques.