SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : Composer Exposure : Arnold Schoenberg’s music is rarely performed, which makes the Ventura Symphony’s next concert noteworthy.

Arnold Schoenberg was a recent immigrant to California when he completed his technically daunting, emotionally riveting Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in 1936. Schoenberg, whose radical 12-tone system of composition invited as much controversy as awe, was a Jew who fled his native Vienna when Hitler assumed power in 1933.

It’s hard not to read into the concerto some of the anguish that must have affected the composer at the time.

Formalized in the first decade of the century, Schoenberg’s 12-tone system--in which conventional methods of harmonic organization were dispensed with in favor of a “tone row”--essentially opened the floodgates of 20th-Century musical thought.

He left his mark on Southern California, settling in Brentwood in 1934 and teaching at both USC and UCLA. He died in 1951, never having returned to his homeland. Still, though, the opportunity to hear Schoenberg’s music is rare in Southern California--and in the United States generally. All of which makes the upcoming performance of his violin concerto at the next Ventura Symphony concert Nov. 2 a noteworthy local event.

Tackling the virtuosic score will be violinist Rose Mary Harbison, the wife of composer John Harbison, last seen in these parts at the Ojai Festival in June. Leonard Stein, the noted scholar, pianist and conductor, is the Ventura Symphony’s guest conductor, and he has framed the concerto with the somewhat obscure Mozart Symphony No. 25 and the world premiere of Leon Milo’s “Quintrillium.”

“I think it’s a well-balanced program,” Stein said. “Two Austrian composers, one American.”

As a conductor, Stein believes in this cross-historical approach to programming, especially in terms of giving precious air time to the work of contemporary composers. “Some conductors feel that they have a duty that way and others find that it’s difficult because of the limited rehearsal time. But you’ve got to break the ice someplace.”

Written by Mozart at the ripe old age of 17, Symphony No. 25 in G Minor--his first in a minor key--was an important step in his maturation. Stein chose the piece for the program, as both a reference to the earlier Viennese school and a bow to the popular Mozart Bicentennial.

“I thought it would be interesting to have on that program a work . . . which is really on the verge of his breakthrough as the tremendous composer that he was. It’s also a very beautifully proportioned work.”

So is Stein, an avowed Schoenbergian, also a Mozartean?

“Isn’t everybody? It’s irresistible. There’s something to each Mozart work that is so unusual.”

When it comes to Southern Californians’ devotion to the cause of Schoenberg--of getting his music heard and more widely dispersed--few individuals have been more active than Stein. Los Angeles born and bred, Stein studied with Schoenberg at USC in the ‘30s, later becoming his teaching assistant. He has edited a Schoenberg journal, conducted the composer’s chamber works and played most of his piano music.

Although Stein retired from his position as director of USC’s Schoenberg Institute this year, a role he’s had since 1975, he continues to spread the gospel of Schoenberg. At the time of an interview last week, Stein was preparing for a conference in Los Angeles on Schoenberg’s historical significance.

“He’s one of the important people of the 20th Century, and we’re trying to reassess and reevaluate this,” he said. “As with any great personage, the interpretations keep changing. The evaluation means something different today than it did 10 years ago.”

After a long cycle of general taste leaning toward the arch-consonance of minimalism, neo-Romanticism and warhorse programming, Schoenberg’s important atonal pieces--including the violin concerto--sound more vibrant than ever.

So why has Schoenberg’s music had such a fitful relationship with standard repertoire?

“Well, I’m not going to point my finger at anyone,” Stein said tactfully. “There are just certain conductors who performed his music more than others.

“The conductor in the L. A. Philharmonic who did the most Schoenberg was probably Zubin Mehta. He felt that it was important. But he had come out of Europe, where playing his music was a regular situation.”

For his part, Stein would like to help demystify the Schoenberg canon.

“A work like the violin concerto has been, through our own times, a little rare because the word got around that it was such a difficult work to play,” he said. “But since good violinists have been taking the piece up, I think there’s been less fear that it’s going to be impossible to perform.

“The forms and the outline of it are very classical--three movements and each one with well-defined sections. It’s really not that difficult to perform or listen to.”

Lack of familiarity, Stein said, is also the orchestra’s main stumbling block.

“If they played it as often as they did Tchaikovsky or Brahms or, closer to our own time, Berg or Bartok, it wouldn’t be that forbidding.”

Of violin concertos from the camp of Serialist composers, Alban Berg’s is better known than that of his mentor Schoenberg. Written just before his death in 1935, Berg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is more elegiac in tone compared to Schoenberg’s varied, intense piece. A Requiem for Manon Gropius, the young daughter of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and also a kind of prescient requiem for himself, Berg’s violin concerto was also considered an anti-Nazi statement.

Listening to Schoenberg’s concerto also shores up images of what could be interpreted as Nazi dread. In the final movement, before a mind-bending violin cadenza brings the work to a shattering, irresolute close, snare drum rolls trigger militaristic evocations.

“I don’t think it’s militaristic in that sense,” Stein said. “It’s more of a parade. It reminds me of an occasion where Schoenberg and his friends were marching around his house, trying to illustrate a typical Austrian march.”

Stein believes that Schoenberg’s reputation as an austere, abstract artist who appeals to a select audience is greatly exaggerated.

Does he feel like something of a crusader for Schoenberg?

“I never did like that,” Stein said. “You feel like you’re a high-class salesman. That’s not the purpose. You have to link this to all other music.

“It doesn’t need that kind of advocacy anymore. It should just be placed in the broad stream of music.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

The Ventura Symphony, with guest conductor Leonard Stein, will perform Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, Arnold Schoenberg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra featuring Rose Mary Harbison and the world premiere of Leon Milo’s “Quintrillium.” The performance will be at 8:15 p.m. Nov. 2 at the Oxnard Civic Auditorium, 800 Hobson Way.