SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : A Grand Pairing : Ventura County Symphony and Master Chorale will join forces for Brahms’ ‘Requiem’ in a concert Saturday in Oxnard.

Grandeur is often the order of the day when Ventura County’s twin musical organisms, the symphony and the Master Chorale, get together for a concert.

And in the classical canon, grandeur can tend to be accompanied by religious reverberations.

Whether or not Saturday’s concert in Oxnard inspires religious reverie, it’s sure to inspire sonic awe.

Last year, the joined forces took on Mahler’s Second Symphony, “The Resurrection.” This year, the main dish is Brahms’ towering work “Ein Deutsches Requiem,” roughly 70 minutes of some of the most transcendent music to have come out of the 19th Century.

Frank Salazar, charter music director of the 30-year-old symphony, and Burns Taft, the head of the 10-year-old Master Chorale, seem to be kindred spirits.

Both are Ventura College teachers by day, and both have been known to intersperse 20th-Century music into their respective seasons’ programming. (The next Master Chorale concert in March features music by Kodaly, Britten and Ives.)

“Ein Deutsches Requiem,” though, belongs to another era and ideal entirely.

As Requiems go, Brahms’ is both atypical and a perfection of the form--atypical because Brahms eschewed the traditional Catholic Latin text in favor of select passages from the German Bible.

Brahms was intent on keeping his work fairly ecumenical.

In the original version, he avoided any specific reference to Christ, a point that is lost in the English version (which is being performed in Oxnard).

The renowned late musicologist Karl Geiringer, who spent his later years at UC Santa Barbara, wrote: “The Latin Requiem is a prayer for the peace of the dead, threatened with the horrors of the Last Judgment; Brahms’ Requiem, on the contrary, utters words of consolation, designed to reconcile the living with the idea of suffering and death.”

It was the Requiem that made Brahms famous, beginning a legacy that earned him a spot in the lofty company of what a pundit called the “three B’s--Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.”

But the composer began his life humbly.

He was born in 1833 in the port town of Hamburg, the son of a double bassist. Starting at 13, Brahms played piano in taverns for sailors.

Word of his prodigious gift spread with the help and effusive praises of Robert Schumann. Schumann died soon after meeting Brahms, and the younger composer carried on a lifelong friendship with the widowed Clara Schumann.

Brahms worked on the Requiem for more than a decade. There is debate over whose death--his mother’s or Robert Schumann’s--inspired the project.

When the finished Requiem premiered in 1868, Brahms’ reputation was launched, and was later cemented by his First Symphony, dubbed the “10th symphony” after Beethoven.

In a sense, Brahms’ music was a critical bridge between the models of old--especially Beethoven--and the emerging high romanticism of the late 19th Century.

Whereas expressive flourish was becoming commonplace, Brahms adhered to a program of restraint and formal rectitude.

His compositions were once likened to a Gypsy woman dancing in a tight corset: “latent heat beneath a formal exterior.”

Brahms’ legendary rift with the younger, more modern-leaning Richard Wagner was fought more by outside parties than by Brahms himself, who was no pugilist and appreciated the differences of style even if his outlook was essentially conservative.

What we hear in his Requiem is a grandiose, but twilit, opus that carves an elegant path through mourning, reflection and redemption.

Despite the expanded ranks of musicians involved, it is beautiful music of a meditative kind that transcends time, text or creed.

Pianist in her stride: The notion that good things come to those who wait is a truism of choice these days for Dorothy Donegan.

Last month, the 69-year-old pianist was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame by the National Endowment for the Arts, and she will be honored by the International Assn. of African Music in June.

“People wait till you get old to honor you,” the musician said in an interview last week. “They say, ‘Well, better late than never.’ And I always say, ‘Well, if I’d have known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.’ ”

Saturday night, Donegan will kick off the spring jazz concert series being put on by the Jazz and World Music Society at the Center Stage Theater in Santa Barbara’s leviathan Paseo Nuevo.

As with last year’s series, the fare leans toward the adventurous side of jazz, featuring some of the finer non-traditional jazz musicians based in Los Angeles.

Also in the series are Henry Butler on March 7, James Newton on April 4 and the Bobby Bradford Mo’tet on June 6. (May’s concert is still to be announced.)

Over the years and decades, Donegan, an Art Tatum protege of considerable virtuosity and wily humor, has been noted for her monstrous technique.

She has also sometimes been criticized for her show-biz flair in performance, a tendency that began in her vaudeville days during the ‘40s.

What can we expect at a Dorothy Donegan concert?

“Well, I play the Earl Hines- and the Teddy Wilson-type stuff, but I’m not spaced out. In other words, I want to know, ‘Where’s the melody?’

“And you play to your audience. You still have to be cognizant of what the people want to hear. Some people want to hear ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart.’ The entertainer usually wants to play what they want to hear. I think I integrate all styles.”

A classical pianist as well as a jazz musician, Donegan performed at the Hollywood Bowl last year, first playing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and then performing a set of her own material.

The crowd went wild.

“I got a standing ovation with 17,000 people. I like to see all of those people standing up. I guess that’s an indication of love.”

At long last, Donegan’s calendar is filling up as indications of love come pouring in.

* WHERE AND WHEN

The Ventura County Symphony and the Ventura County Master Chorale will perform at the Oxnard Civic Auditorium, 800 Hobson Way, at 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $12, $17, $19 or $23. For tickets or information, call 486-2424.

Dorothy Donegan, in concert at the Center Stage Theater in the Paseo Nuevo shopping center at Chapala and De la Guerra streets in Santa Barbara, at 8:15 p.m. Saturday. There will be a “Meet the Composer” session with Donegan at 7 p.m. Tickets to the concert are $18.50. For tickets or information, call 963-0408.