VENTURA COUNTY WEEKEND : Future Looks Bright for City’s Chamber Festival

It may have seemed like a frivolous ambition when a determined group of people launched the Ventura Chamber Festival last year. Skeptics might have sniffed. But after the bigger and better second annual festival concluded its 16-concert run last weekend, it started looking like the little festival that could.

At this stage, the festival seems to represent a win-win situation, reflecting well on the cultural priorities of Ventura, accenting its civic beauty--acting as a boon for tourism, as well--and furthering the chamber music cause. It may be too early to call it an institution, but the festival seems to have found its legs, not to mention its pockets. The city’s $50,000 contribution and corporate sponsorships made it possible.

One could quibble with the marketing of the concerts, which reduced them to catchy, kitschy titles and made it hard to ascertain what music and which musicians were performing. Music and musicians are the point, yes? Also, fans of contemporary music could grouse about the relative lack of new music (but what else is new?).

But generally the festival provided a dose of cultural good. Part of the civic value of the festival is its spotlight on the makeshift musical venues found in Ventura. Church venues ranged from the mission to eccentric architect Robert Stacy-Judd’s infamous Church of Religious Science to Our Lady of Assumption, where the Ventura County Chamber Orchestra settled in for its keynote concert Saturday night. Music also was played in coffeehouses, on a yacht and at City Hall.

Thursday night’s concert featured the formidable Indonesian pianist Eduardus Halim--the hero of the festival--amid the engagingly peculiar mock-Mayan motifs of the Church of Religious Science. Halim performed well on Schubert and Dvorak, despite some ragged playing and intonational indiscretions by fellow musicians. He hit an expressive pinnacle on Prokofiev’s Sonata in D for Flute and Piano, with flutist Carol Lockart.

Lockart was heard again as one-fifth of the Wind Quintet, which landed at Ventura City Hall on Saturday morning. Unfortunately, the planned piece by American composer Joan Tower was scrapped because of its complexity--a conductor would be necessary, oboist Joel Timm explained.

But they played strongly throughout the program, especially on Samuel Barber’s “Summer Music for Woodwind Quintet,” perfectly accessible yet inventive. Harpist Marcia Dickstein added her considerable gift to the mix on Chou Wen-Chung’s Suite for Harp and Wind Quintet, an elegant East-meets-West puzzle with overlapping tonalities and textures.

Guitarist Matthew Greif, who lives in Ventura and teaches at Ventura College, is a player of impressive range and skill. His recital coincided with the release of a fine debut CD, “Permanent Transition,” on the Metro Records label. Last week’s recital, to a packed house at the First United Methodist Church, offered a neat survey of Greif’s scope, from noted Baroque composer Leopold Weiss to the familiar Spanish strains of guitar music by Fernando Sor and Isaac Albeniz.

Greif’s interest in jazz surfaced with his arrangement of the hauntingly beautiful Miles Davis ballad “Blue in Green.” For some reason, Greif outfitted the tune with a swinging midsection, which undermined its innate, melancholic lyricism.

But the real news here was the official world premiere of “Tennessee,” by Oxnard’s Miguel del Aguila, whose music has greatly enriched the local scene over the last few years. Greif gave a bold reading of del Aguila’s piece, which lies well on the guitar--with smart use of open strings, harmonics and other idiomatic touches--and takes, as its theme, the emotional friction found in “Streetcar Named Desire.”

This is a romantic piece in that it depicts innocence on the brink, emotional tenderness locked in a struggle with tense realities. A final, lovely melody is played with harmonics, before ending on a tolling low E and a major seventh interval that is both sweet and dissonant--like Blanche Dubois’ saga.

Guitar was again center stage Saturday afternoon, when the accomplished duo of Michael Newman and Laura Oltman performed in the surprisingly suitable makeshift venue of El Paso Imports’ large and reverberant showroom. This couple makes an articulate case for the vibrancy of the guitar duo format, with its neatly meshed sound.

The first half of the concert belonged to the 19th century, including an unexpectedly juicy guitar rendition of Rossini’s Overture to “Barber of Seville.” More provocative sonorities came in the second half, particularly with Dusan Bogdanovic’s Sonata Fantasia, which the duo premiered a couple of years ago.

The piece by Bogdanovic, a San Francisco guitarist and composer, is a vigorous and almost cubist version of flamenco. For an encore, the duo closed with a cozy guitar-for-four-hands piece by John Dowland. Four hands, one voice.

For the festival’s new-music component, experimental koto player Miya Masaoka and Pamela Z, performance artist and techno vocalist, performed together and apart at the Performance Space. Both hail from the Bay Area, and both bring personal vision to the idea of treating ancient instruments--the koto and the human voice--with gadgets and extended techniques.

Masaoka is a unique player whose respect for her venerable instrument is coupled with a desire to extract new sounds, “preparing” the instrument with cymbals through the strings or bowing it for long tones. Her improvisational fluidity makes her a ripe candidate for collaborations with musicians--such as Z--from the new-music and jazz camps.

Using digital delays and sound-modifying equipment, Z created tapestries of sound by layering loops of phrases or words. With the use of the Body Synth instrument, she also triggered samples and sounds by moving her limbs, bringing music and dance together in a surreal whole.

Saturday night at Our Lady of Assumption, the Chamber Orchestra, under conductor Burns Taft, was in full force and impressive form. There were some detectable cracks in Tchaikovsky’s “Mozartiana,” but Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony emerged victorious. Taft marshaled a solid and moving account, good to the last sigh of calm resolution.

To close, pianist Halim took on the Shostakovich Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Trumpet, with trumpeter Rob Frear. Halim brought proper degrees of focus and, finally, abandon, to the proceedings with a dazzling finale that threatened to spin breathlessly out of control.

These were a few impressions from a festival full of energy and promise for the future. In time perhaps this reputedly sleepy burg by the sea could become a chamber music haven to contend with.