The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 51

CALENDAR NA calendarlive.com Arts Entertainment Style Culture HOME Rock solid Stone can give a yard shape and texture. Page 8 MUSEUMS Walking tour art in Santa Barbara. You just have to know where to look. Page 5 7 Quick 2 In Calendar Damon Winter Los Angeles Times By Mark Swed Times Staff Writer Harry Bicket, one of the rising stars of the early music movement, has conducted here in the past. He manned the pit for Los Angeles three years ago.

His performance was exciting but rushed perhaps he was in a hurry to get through a long opera and muddled production. Tuesday night, Bicket made his Hollywood Bowl debut, leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in an unusually unhack- neyed program that revolved around late Haydn and early Mendelssohn and included a rare bit by supposed nemesis (if you believe everything you see in the movies), Antonio Salieri. The Bowl is a challenge for early musickers, who like little sounds in little rooms for their often obscure old music and elitist patrons; the amphitheater is ahumongous, up-to-date pleasure garden where wine flows freely and some in the crowd are unafraid to do whatever they feel like. But Bicket overcame most Bowl obstacles with refreshing ease. Thanks to the video screens added this year, a new conductor is now introduced to the audience during the national anthem.

That means that a listener willing to restrain patriotic ardor enough to focus on the conductor was rewarded by the opportunity to see every small expression on He has a crisp, near-military baton style, but a raised eyebrow here, a subtly bemused smile there although never disrespectful to the Stars and Stripes revealed just a hint of impishness. And impishness in the scholarly world of early music is always a good thing. The overture to opera Secchia Stolen Bucket) is nothing memorable, but it is light, amusing, tuneful and nothing like you might expect from the dour character in The performance sped along happily, although it seemed, at least in my neck of the Bowl woods, not to hold the attention of particularly antsy picnickers, which meant it was probably historically accurate, since this music most likely fared no better with rowdy 18th century operagoers. Symphony No. 104 comes from almost the same time.

Its premiere was MUSIC REVIEW A star rises at the Bowl Early music specialist Harry Bicket conquers the sprawling venue with humor and ease. See Bowl, Page E6 By Elaine Dutka Times Staff Writer Director E. psychological thriller opens Friday, your everyday Hollywood filmmaker. Aformer visual artist and poet, he thinks of film as collective and of himself as a tribal storyteller targeting Frustrated with linear exposition and the limitations of onetime New Yorker is less concerned with dialogue than with allegory, imagery and poetic between characters. his 1991 black-and-white feature debut, had no words.

Still, embraced by such literati as Susan Sontag, the archetypal creation myth landed on Time Top 10 list that year. So impressed was Nicolas Cage with the footage that he hired Merhige to direct of the a $6- million German Expressionist-style commentary on the creative process in the guise of a vampire movie. Oscar-nominated for cinematography and makeup, it landed Independent Spirit and Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. awards for Willem Dafoe as best supporting actor. It also paved the way for the first mainstream Hollywood effort, which Paramount Pictures will release in 1,500 theaters.

In it, Merhige again delves into the dark disturbing, psychic bond between onetime CIA agent Benjamin (Ben Kingsley)and current operative Thomas Mackelway (Aaron chasing a serial killer with the help of his former partner (Carrie-Anne technology, transmits telepathic clues about the whereabouts of the questions about whether on the trail of the man or is actually the monster himself. fixation with the underbelly is rooted in childhood fears and dreams, the director explained, especially a near- fatal car accident at 19. No longer breathing, he became aware of a hyper- layers that exist simultaneously. budgeted in the $20- million-plus range, is not only a cat-and- mouse tale but also a portrait of an ordinary world turned upside down, he observed. The killer is everywhere and nowhere, a force of nature rather than a fleshed-out character.

has turned into a giant beast with images he shut off. our post world, obliterated good and evil, creating a fat, gray said Merhige, 40. are things on the periphery you put into words. Opening a letter can give you anthrax. Passenger planes are used as missiles.

We watch beheadings on TV. The biggest industry in this country is antidepressants because always waiting for the other shoe to Afan of silent-film master Sergei Eisenstein and Spanish surrealist Luis was told by the late When evil is on the prowl E. Elias Merhige enters mainstream filmmaking with a film that explores the telepathic search for a monster. See Merhige, Page E6 Carlos Chavez Los Angeles Times our post world, obliterated good and evil, creating a fat, gray Elias Merhige Director of What makes a can of paint worth $50 a gallon? The color, of course and more special effects than a summer blockbuster. There are shades that scream and grand finishes that evoke vistas of windswept sand.

Lifting the lid on L.A.’s latest decorating craze. Page 12 Francine Orr Los Angeles Times DECORATING Pamper your walls.