Popular, but will it fit in?

Somewhere behind all the champagne toasts to Walt Disney Concert Hall as the spectacular new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in particular and classical music in general, a question lurks: Is there room at the party for pop music?

It doesn’t look like it so far.

The few pop offerings on the inaugural season schedule are scattered amid disparate concert series rather than part of any focused effort to showcase top-drawer pop, rock, folk, country, blues or R&B; performers.

So far, there’s no Bob Dylan solo acoustic concert, no “Beck & Friends Live at Disney Hall,” no “Barbra Streisand Unplugged” shows -- nothing remotely equivalent to the classical-world star power that has defined the Philharmonic’s first three months in the $274-million, Frank Gehry-designed hall.

Bluegrass star Alison Krauss slipped into Disney Hall for a Dec. 2 concert through the equivalent of a side door: She and her Union Station band were included on the hall’s four-concert “world music” series, along with Cape Verde singer Cesaria Evora, Portuguese fado singer Mariza and Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain’s Masters of Percussion. And Oregon’s hipster lounge big-band Pink Martini provided the music for the hall’s New Year’s Eve bash. There’s even a nod to hip-hop still to come this season in the form of the Dakah Hip-Hop Orchestra, but the L.A. ensemble shows up on the venue’s series of youth concerts alongside a couple of chamber orchestras and youth symphony groups.

L.A. Philharmonic Assn. President Deborah Borda concedes that pop fans have gotten the short end of the baton to date, but says it’s just a matter of time before they’ll see how Disney Hall and pop music really mix.

“One of the issues the Philharmonic Assn. was deeply cognizant of was that in the first year we needed to go very slowly and see how things work,” she says. “We are experts in presenting classical music. Because we operate the Hollywood Bowl we have some experience with other kinds of music, but in this venue, we tried not to overwhelm ourselves, and the venue, by not being able to do it properly....

“One of the things I took so deeply to heart as I got to know Frank Gehry ... is his philosophy that as much as we could, we want to make it a living room for the city,” Borda adds. “That means we’re consciously committed to presenting a number of nonclassical music events here each season.”

That number will be about 20 this year, because despite the absence of a formal pop music series, Disney Hall does have both a world music series and a jazz series.

That’s not uncommon at performing arts centers around the country, and it has as much to do with the more transitory nature of pop music bookings as with facility managers’ interest in including pop alongside the classical music, ballet, opera and Broadway presentations that typically dominate their schedules.

Still, some have used pop to increase their profiles. Carnegie Hall just launched a new concert series for broadcast over NPR stations around the country blending pop artists such as Randy Newman and Emmylou Harris with contemporary classical musicians including John Adams and the Kronos Quartet. And the Kentucky Center for the Arts in Louisville explores the country and folk music native to the region with its “Lonesome Pine Specials” series for PBS television.

Pop attractions usually don’t finalize tours more than six months to a year in advance, whereas touring orchestras and ballet companies often know their schedules several years ahead. That makes it more difficult for performing arts centers to assemble a series of significant pop music shows in the subscription packages most rely on, rather than just a handful of individual concerts.

Several Southland concert promoters say the 2,265-seat Disney Hall intrigues them as a potential site for special-event quality pop music. “I couldn’t think of anything better than seeing Joni Mitchell there,” says veteran L.A. promoter Andy Hewitt, who has worked with the L.A. Philharmonic Assn. in booking numerous pop acts into the Hollywood Bowl in recent years. “I went to the opening and I think it’s an extraordinary building. My thought is it would be great for a Billy Joel when he does his lectures, which he normally does in colleges. Billy Joel or Elton John or someone like that who could perform that way without amplification. But there are a lot of challenges.”

Indeed, one of the biggest is amplification. “If they ever get a band in there with amps on stage, God help them,” says Krauss’ longtime sound engineer, Bernie Velluti. “My perceptions are that they didn’t give a lot of thought about doing traveling road shows, as opposed to orchestras.... In some of these rooms, when they tell you, ‘The acoustics are great -- you’ll love it!’ that means ... you end up fighting the room.”

That’s because the same acoustical properties that can make an orchestra shine -- lots of reflective surfaces that create a “live,” reverberant ambience -- often bedevil sound engineers who rely on microphones, amplifiers and PA systems that pick up and magnify those reverberations along with the musicians’ voices and their instruments.

The sound at pianist Keith Jarrett’s Nov. 2 performance with his trio, the hall’s first nonclassical performance, left fans, critics and Jarrett’s management wondering what happened to the Disney Hall sound that’s been so glowingly praised in reviews of the L.A. Philharmonic.

Jarrett’s manager, Steve Cloud, calls it “one of the trickiest [concert halls] we’ve ever played anywhere in the world” and says Jarrett probably would not return, unless it were in a solo acoustic setting rather than with his lightly amplified trio.

Sound problems continued, by most accounts, with Evora’s Nov. 18 concert, but improved significantly by the time Krauss arrived, although Velluti said, “I think the sound we got was fairly decent, but it wasn’t where I wanted it to be.”

Velluti said he thinks pop music at Disney Hall is treated as “an afterthought.” That wouldn’t be surprising since the prime directive given Gehry and acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota was to create the best acoustical space for the L.A. Philharmonic, no compromises.

Their design further complicates the creation of top-notch amplified sound. The stage is at the center and bottom of a bowl-shaped room, with seating on all four sides -- again, ideal for an orchestra but problematic for almost everything else.

“There are essentially four sound systems: east, west, south and north, so you have basically five rooms including the stage, which is its own acoustic domain,” Cloud says. The majority of major concert halls built in the last two decades are, in fact, multipurpose facilities that can host a variety of events, from classical and ballet to opera, Broadway musicals and pop, and provide each with a reasonably suitable environment.

The single-mindedness behind the creation of Disney Hall, therefore, presents performers who amplify their music with significant sonic challenges, which have been addressed to an extent with the addition of sound-absorbing curtains suspended from the ceiling during shows requiring use of Disney Hall’s sound system.

Still, Cloud says, “Technology won’t completely erase the physical properties of the room.”

Borda agrees that pop music at Disney Hall remains a work in progress.

“There are a lot of different issues to deal with,” she says. “We had a very painstaking tuning process [of the hall] for the orchestra over summer and fall. We did some for pop music, but we didn’t have as much experience with pop. We had to learn how to deploy the speakers, and that we have to have some acoustic curtains ....I think we’re 85% to 90% there. We’ll figure out the rest.”