SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : Grand Finale : After 30 years of wielding the baton, Ventura County Symphony founder Frank Salazar gives his farewell concert.

Retirement doesn’t come easy, especially when you’ve founded an enterprise, devoted yourself to it for 30 years and watched it sprout wings. Such is the saga of Frank Salazar, who ably steered the Ventura County Symphony from a gleam in his eye in 1962 to its current status as a solid ensemble with generous community support.

Before passing the baton to the incoming music director Boris Brott, Salazar capped off his achievement Saturday with a sweeping, if uncharacteristically conservative, farewell concert.

If you were to judge Salazar’s operation only by his last concert, you might assume that it was logjammed in 19th-Century repertoire (the music was squarely from that ever-popular century, except for Haydn’s trumpet concerto in E-flat, written in 1786).

In fact, the conductor has made considerable strides in presenting a wide array of music. The unjustly neglected music of Latin America and that other foreign land--the 20th Century--has often found its way into the Oxnard Civic Auditorium.

But not on this night. Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Doppler were the fare du jour , along with a little encore of the bluegrass chestnut “Orange Blossom Special” as performed by the Acousticats. As locals know, the Acousticats’ violinist--excuse me, fiddler--Phil Salazar, his son, is one of the maestro’s notable musical productions.

Upping the evening’s aura of festivity, the Acousticats came onstage ready to sabotage classical propriety. While the orchestra sawed away on the opening measures of Beethoven’s Fifth, the upstarts started up. The crowd went relatively wild.

Saturday’s finale had an added resonance in that it followed closely last week’s riotous state of siege in Los Angeles and provided an emotional balm for the atmosphere of unrest.

On the way to the Oxnard Civic Auditorium, one couldn’t escape the air of uncertainty and hostility. A van sported seething red-painted epithets about jurors in the King beating case.

The concert hall is not and should not be a sanctuary from the real world, but it can be a temporary safe harbor.

In a preconcert lecture, Salazar said: “When I watch TV, all I want to do is make music.” During the talk, he also emphasized that in devising the program for his final official concert at the helm, he chose to focus on the orchestra itself. “Tonight,” he said, “I will play the Ventura County Symphony.”

For the occasion, Salazar passed the soloist spotlight to members of the home team orchestra rather than the customary importing of outside musicians.

Trumpeter David Scott handled the Haydn concerto, recently repopularized by Wynton Marsalis, with technical ease and bold tone. Papa Haydn’s assured sense of order proved comforting under the social circumstances.

Flutists Carol Lockhart, a Ventura native, and Ann Erwin--in an iridescent dress evoking the Emerald City--performed the Concerto for Two Flutes and Orchestra by Franz Doppler, well-known for his championing of the flute. The piece is worthwhile listening more as a showpiece for the instrument than as an inspiring work on its own merit.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 is a grand work, as in a grand finale. Salazar applied to the score all the proper degrees of hush and gusto, sometimes stomping his foot before a crashing crescendo.

Blessed with wide scope, sweep, sophisticated structure yet melodic simplicity, kneady themes, and heart-on-sleeve earnestness, Tchaikovsky’s symphonic work is a sure-fire audience-pleaser.

After the musical part of the evening, commemorative awards were bestowed on Salazar and his wife, Judy, symphony librarian.

Edward Duval, the first symphony board president, spoke fondly of the “intrepid conductor” who, 30 years ago, “persuaded about two dozen of us to start up the Ventura Symphony Assn. We never in our wildest dreams thought it would reach this state.” He gestured back to the orchestra.

That persuasiveness onstage, in his role as teacher at Ventura College and behind the scenes of the local cultural support system, leaves a heroic legacy in the annals of Ventura music. The symphony now moves into its next chapter.

Taking it to City Hall: The City Hall Concert Series is upon us again, a little later in the season than last year. The marble-covered lobby of Ventura City Hall provides an atmospheric and acoustically complementary setting for chamber music in a historical place.

This year’s four-concert series is a well-balanced cross-section, starting Saturday evening with La Stravaganza, specializing in baroque music played on period instruments. On the program are works by such composers as Francois Couperin, Robert De Visee and Marin Marais. Ventura-based composer John Biggs will give a preconcert “informance” at 7 p.m.

Coming up in the series are concerts by the contemporary music ensemble Xtet (May 23), the Kent/Shulman violin/harp duo (June 27) and the adventurous Elgart/Yates guitar duo (July 18). All in all, it sounds like a well-rounded series.

The notes behind the legend: Composer-theoretician Milton Babbitt, a 50-year veteran of Princeton University and recipient of a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1982, is one of those musical figures best known for his ideas and his imperious attitude toward contemporary music.

His actual musical output remains fairly obscure. And that’s a shame: Babbitt’s music, while atonal and intellectually rigorous, teems with textural contrast and other forms of vivid, anti-romantic stimuli.

William Kraft, chairman of the UC Santa Barbara music department and director of the first New Music Festival to be held May 11-14, hopes to help rectify the situation on a local level. Over the course of the festival’s three concerts, several Babbitt works will be performed. Babbitt will give a keynote lecture on May 12 at 2 p.m. in Music Room 1145 at UC Santa Barbara.

Also featured will be music by Kraft, Santa Barbara’s legendary spatially experimental composer Henry Brant, computer musician Joanne Kuchera-Morin and others. It’s an auspicious beginning to the university’s new new-minded regime under Kraft.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* La Stravaganza, part of the City Hall Concert Series, in Ventura City Hall at Poli and California streets in Ventura, May 9 at 8 p.m. For information call the Ventura Arts Council at 653-0828.

* The First Annual New Music Festival at UC Santa Barbara, May 11-14, with concerts at Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, May 12-14 at 8 p.m. For information call 893-3230.