Can a building make L.A.'s heart sing?

It looks like an exploding metal artichoke. Some claim it will be - at long last - this city's plush club car to international cachet. Others quietly fear its tin-plate "starchitecture" will remain a tourist novelty and not ignite the downtown cultural scene as city leaders hope.

When conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen raises his baton for the inaugural concert of Walt Disney Concert Hall here tonight, he will by most accounts raise the ambiguous cultural profile of Los Angeles worldwide.

At the least, the nation's second-largest city, embraced around the globe for its entertainment industry but derided for cultural shallowness, now has an impressive focal point.

A flamboyant exclamation point of curvaceous stainless steel, perched atop the downtown's highest hill, Disney Hall is already being hailed by serious critics as a visual and aural delight if not a masterpiece of architecture and acoustics.

Time will tell if its promise lives up to their praise or fulfills architect Frank Gehry's dream of providing a "living room for the city.... [Maestro Salonen] will be at the same time conducting the inside and outside of the building in a wonderful symphony."

It's also uncertain if the building will help usher in the grand urban experiment that its boosters are hoping for: a meaningful downtown crossroads for Los Angeles' disparate racial and economic classes. The shiny new edifice now complements a growing "living room" of cultural landmarks atop Bunker Hill in downtown - all trying to provide a central meeting ground for the region's many cultural communities.

With its surrounding music center, the hall's swooping facades rise across the street from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion - the previous home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and site of global Oscar telecasts. It faces the Arata Isozaki- designed Museum of Contemporary Art, and is just blocks from the new $200 million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. "Disney Hall is the biggest building block yet in the downtown's giant social experiment to cross-fertilize its civic institutions and cultural life," says Thomas Crow, director of the Getty Research Institute. "Now the question is how and whether they all work together."

Disney Hall will do its part as home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, often seen as hub of the city's high culture. "The Los Angeles Philharmonic is one of the great orchestras of the world, it has always needed a hall worthy of its greatness, now it finally has one," says composer John Williams.

But because of long-entrenched notions of symphony orchestras as "high culture," some say there is already a fundamental tension between architect Gehry's communal vision and the perceived elitism of the Philharmonic - which plays the classics of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms but is also known for less-accessible modern music from Berg and Schonberg to Boulez.

This is, after all, the same city that produces such films as "Scary Movie 3" and "Jackass, the Movie."

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