TURNING ON 'TRISTAN' DISNEY HALL PRODUCTION TAKES WAGNER OPERA TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL.

Byline: David Mermelstein Correspondent

It could be almost anything, this ``Tristan Project.'' A new Spielberg movie starring Tom Cruise. A secret government missile program. A lost Robert Ludlum potboiler.

In fact, it's the catchy name of an unconventional rendering of Richard Wagner's seminal opera, ``Tristan und Isolde,'' to be performed twice, on consecutive weekends, by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall starting Friday.

Rather than opt for a traditional concert version of the work, Salonen is working with Peter Sellars, the iconoclastic stage director, and acclaimed video artist Bill Viola on a deconstructed version of the opera, a precursor to their fully staged ``Tristan'' at the Paris Opera in April.

But whatever the virtues of that production may be, Salonen, Sellars and Viola, each of whom has worked with the others before, are presenting something far riskier than a dry run here. Instead of offering the three-act opera complete on a single afternoon or evening, Salonen will conduct one act per day, supplementing each program with music by another composer whose work was greatly influenced by ``Tristan.''

The result - even with Sellars' and Viola's contributions limited because Disney Hall isn't an opera house - should be unlike any previous explorations of the work. `` 'Tristan' is one of those seminal pieces that has so many layers,'' says Salonen. ``It provides material for years of work. It's difficult to imagine exhausting the possibilities.''

Generally credited with unparalleled impact on modern music, ``Tristan'' - which had its premiere in 1882 in Munich - took tonality, orchestration and human endurance to the brink. Its shadow loomed large over Debussy, Mahler, even Schoenberg.

It is not the longest opera ever written, running a mere three hours and 45 minutes, nor does it require the most musicians - though it employs plenty. It isn't even the most ``difficult'' score in the repertory; plenty of newer works tax conductors and singers more.

Yet there it stands, almost taunting the performers who have come of age in its wake. Legendary Isoldes like Kirsten Flagstad and incomparable Tristans like Lauritz Melchior still crowd the public imagination, haunting present-day sopranos and tenors a good half-century after these paragons' retirements.

Conductors don't have it any easier. Who wants to compete with giants like Furtwangler, Bohm and Bernstein, whose studio recordings from decades past remain the benchmarks against which modern accounts are measured?

Not Salonen, for one. And that may explain why the conductor has waited until his mid-40s to confront a work all world-class conductors must come to terms with. Which isn't to say that Salonen has been hiding from the piece.

In preparation for the collaboration with Sellars and Viola, the conductor dug up his old Dover score of ``Tristan.'' ``I got it on my 18th birthday,'' he says. ``It has all kinds of markings - an interesting, nostalgic and embarrassing read.''

The work understandably overwhelmed him as a teenager. ``But even for a middle-age man,'' he says, ``it's a big shock.'' His biggest surprise in returning to the score was the quality of the text. ``People tend to say, 'Wonderful music but iffy text,' '' he says. ``And I went along with this chorus for years. But I've completely revised my opinion. Wagner knew exactly what he was doing. The text allows the music to go to very strange places. The opera is intensely intimate.''

For Viola, it is also richly dichotomous, which the title suggests. Though music lovers (and critics) often refer to the work simply as ``Tristan,'' the opera's complexity is compromised by the shorthand. The story is as much Isolde's as Tristan's. ``The whole piece is about the union of opposites,'' says the artist, ``life and death, male and female, fire and water, day and night.''

Those images lie at the heart of Viola's conception, examples of which he shared at a postproduction facility in Hollywood recently. (The images will be projected on a screen 36 feet wide and 20 feet high behind the stage at Disney Hall.) Unexpectedly, Sellars dropped by to check the progress.

The director says working with Viola on this opera involves its own dichotomy, a step into the future and an embrace of the past. ``Bill allows us to stage things that couldn't be staged in the past but that technology has now made possible,'' says the director. ``The flat scenery of the 19th century is a metaphor: hyper-realistic and also naive, like a child's picture book. And Bill's work is like that; it's as though you're seeing these things for the first time.''

Defining Viola's aesthetic isn't easy. The artist's preferred medium is video, but his vocabulary envelops everything from the robustly physical (raging nature) to the ineffably intimate (the mourning process). The common denominator is intensity - though Viola has as many ways of conveying that feeling as Eskimos are reputed to have words for snow. So when, for example, Sellars mentions the need for darkness in a particular scene, Viola almost on cue replies, ``What color dark?'' Sellars, who revels in nuance (sometimes too much so), delights in such responses.

And Viola clearly appreciates the director's keen intellect, suggesting that his own work is bettered by their interaction. ``Peter,'' he says while in the editing bay, ``you have a way of improving reality.''

Speaking of reality, the origins of this collaboration are cloudy. During lunch, Sellars tells Viola that they really need to agree on an official history. It's a good idea, for in a later interview, Salonen recounted the same history with innumerable factual discrepancies, if few material differences.

Regardless of how it all came about, this project promises something singular. Churls may scoff at Disney Hall's transformation into an ersatz opera house, but the unlikely metamorphosis just may work.

Salonen, for one, is quick to defend his decision. ``We do this production on Disney Hall's terms,'' he says. ``It is the ship in the first act, the forest in the second act, and the mountains and island in the third act. Those metaphors work really well.''

But there's also the splitting of the opera to consider, as well as the interpolation of the music directly influenced by ``Tristan'': Berg's ``Lyric Suite,'' a suite from Debussy's ``Pelleas et Melisande'' (arranged by Erich Leinsdorf) and Kaija Saariaho's ``Cinq Reflets,'' inspired by her opera ``L'Amour de Loin.'' Such gambits, however noble, risk musical moralizing.

``It's not a didactic program in that sense,'' insists Salonen. ``I'm not trying to teach the audience anything. They are great works in themselves and make you hear 'Tristan' differently, maybe with a deeper understanding of its importance. It's still a piece with an impact few other pieces have.''

That's one point nobody's going to contest.

TRISTAN PROJECT

What: Multimedia presentation of Wagner's opera, ``Tristan und Isolde,'' over three days on two weekends.

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

When: Act 1 - 8 p.m. Friday, repeated 8 p.m. Dec. 10. Act 2 - 8 p.m. Saturday, repeated 8 p.m. Dec. 11. Act 3 - 2 p.m. Sunday, repeated 2 p.m. Dec. 12.

Tickets: $36 to $125 each night. [phone], www.laphil.com.

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Artist Bill Viola's video work is an integral part of the ``Tristan Project,'' beginning Friday at Disney Hall.