Andrew Nolen and Hai-Ting Chinn perform in La Didone, a commingling of Italian Baroque opera and Italian sci-fi.

Los Angeles Times / GLENN KOENIG

Popular culture and classical music have had different sorts of relationships over the years. Old-timers conjure up a time when radio stations supported great orchestras, television networks commissioned opera and Leopold Stokowski could shake hands with Mickey in Fantasia and then go home to Garbo.

Classical music has never left the cinema, Broadway stage, airways or gossip columns. But relationships change. For the most part rose-colored glasses have come off. Once portrayed as stick-figure heroes, classical artists are now more likely shown as deeply flawed misfits, outsiders to an era obsessed by pop culture like none before it.

Still, they are seen, and seen quite a bit in current films and plays that attempt to engage with the subject of classical music in pop culture terms. Some get it, some don’t. But a trend is afoot.

On screen, we have The Soloist, in which a homeless man finds a bit of salvation in a cello, and Departures, in which a Japanese orchestral musician finds greater salvation stroking corpses than his cello. Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, Tetro, reveals what amazing dysfunction an egotistical conductor can bring upon his family.

Two recent plays are fanciful music history lessons in New York and Los Angeles: Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations starred Jane Fonda on Broadway, and Itamar Moses’ Bach at Leipzig (at Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles). Also in L.A., the Wooster Group’s La Didone, a provocatively stylized commingling of stylized Italian Baroque opera and stylized Italian sci-fi, just finished a triumphant run. So far as the films are concerned, just about everything about music is misrepresented in the The Soloist, which is based on Los Angeles Times’ Steve Lopez’s affecting columns about a homeless, Juilliard-trained bass player musician. Nathaniel Ayers is a real outsider artist and an inspired one who has picked up the cello (and quite a few other instruments).

Ayers’ uneven but charismatic and richly soulful playing is smoothed out into the gorgeous sound of Los Angeles Philharmonic cellist Ben Hong and unconscionably, a philharmonic cellist who gave Ayers lessons is turned into a religious zealot on a mission.

Even so, I prefer a musically sanitized Ayers to the misfit in Departures, the Japanese feature that won this year’s Oscar for foreign film. After a struggling Tokyo orchestra suddenly goes out of business, an unemployed cellist finds a new profession preparing and beatifying corpses for burial. Scenes jump from him playing sentimental music in the fields among spring blooms to dashing off to funerals.

Coppola comes by his connection to classical music though his late father, Carmine, a flutist in the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini. Yet the domineering patriarch in Tetro is a cliched, musically unconvincing character with Toscanini’s fame and an outsized libido. The classics are more conventionally served in 33 Variations and Bach at Leipzig. In one, Beethoven struggles to complete his “Diabelli” Variations while a terminally ill, latter-day musicologist struggles to find out why the composer ever bothered with Diabelli’s silly little waltz theme to begin with. In the other, famous German composers and organists compete for a post in Leipzig in 1722. Beethoven and Bach are not exactly outsiders here, but they do represent the “other,” musical masters who function on a higher level than those around them. The Wooster’s Group’s La Didone, however, proved the most convincing display of transcendental otherness, blending Francesco Cavalli’s anachronistic 17th-century opera La Didone with Mario Bava’s anachronistic 1965 film, Planet of the Vampires.Pop culture is not wrong in looking at classical art as outsider art. It’s best to butt heads, for when the pop people get reverent they usually get sappy.