Classical Horizons : Symphony Director Boris Brott hopes to build enthusiasm by expanding boundaries.

This was the year that was, and then some. In the Ventura music scene to the right and left of rock ‘n’ roll--classical, jazz, country, and experimental music--there were comings and goings, beginnings and endings, unrequited desires and small pleasures peppering the calendar.

All in all, it was another year in the advancing cultural history of a region that seems fit to burst. Southern California continues to tip northward, spilling some of its population and attentions toward Ventura County. That motion is reflected in the slow, steady evolution of its cultural life.

Above all, this was the year that Boris came.

Boris Brott, fresh from the Great White North, took over the baton for the Ventura County Symphony from founding music director Frank Salazar, retiring after 30 years. All over town, brochures shouted the news from the rooftops, tongue in cheek and high on hope: “BORIS IS COMING!”

Boris did indeed come, and brought a new blast of popular appeal and boosterism to the symphony organization. He filled the Oxnard Civic, rearranged the hall’s stage, and offered friendly educational patter to the audiences.

In an interview before his debut concert in October, he affirmed, “my prime goal initially is to sow the seeds of enthusiastic collaboration of all the players: the board, the auditorium, the press, the players, the audience. Once we’ve got a feeling of ‘hey, this is exciting, this is fun,’ that’s the first step, and then you can do things with that.

“Without that, you can’t do anything. So it has to be holistic and it has to be long-term. You can’t conceive of things in the short-term. They have to be evolutionary.”

In terms of contemporary music programming, always a strong point in Salazar’s reign, what Brott brought to the symphony was a more level-headed approach. More to the point, he removed contemporary works from the agenda, retreating to a more stolid, salable romantic and baroque repertoire.

The maestro explained that he plans to work in a more adventurous program in the coming seasons. “There has to be a sense that, because the audience is learning, they can’t be afraid to show their ignorance.

“Everybody must be in the same bag of saying ‘The emperor’s got no clothes on, so let’s put some clothes on the emperor,’ as opposed to going around and saying ‘Oh, that was very interesting.”

On a more international front, this was also the year that Boulez came.

It matters not that the eminent conductor-composer Pierre Boulez is a frequent visitor to the Ojai Festival. He still brings a fresh vision and discipline to a festival that has been in a wavering pattern in recent years.

Whereas Boulez performed a fair amount of his own serialist music during his 1989 visit, this year’s festival was rich in the stuff of Stravinsky.

Most notoriously, a radicalized, topical version of “L’Histoire du Soldat” featured a Peter Sellars-directed staging with rap rhetoric and an all-black cast. Purists may have sniffed, but the staging was a brilliant merger of musical idioms that had a special relevance coming a few weeks after the riots had left a scorch mark on the Southern Californian mindstate.

This was also the year that Ventura’s civic court composer John Biggs brought his sounds to town.

Biggs has made his home in Ventura for a few years, but in 1992, his notable music was in plentiful display. Biggs’ pieces showed up in the seasons of the Master Chorale, the Ventura Symphony, at a special concert at Ojai’s Thacher School and at a 60th birthday celebration at the City Hall in October.

Chorally speaking, the 10-year-old Master Chorale continued its fine work and headed to Poland for a summer residency. The legendary choral director Roger Wagner passed away this fall, but he gave us a grand farewell by leading the Moorpark Chorale in a concert in the spring.

In what was, sadly, the swan song season for the City Hall Concert series, we heard from the contemporary chamber music ensemble, Xtet, and the dazzling Elgart-Yates guitar duo. Say it’s not over for good. . . .

This was the year that jazz popped up in teasing doses, but still is virtually a music without a home in this county. While country venues waged a friendly assault on the landscape, jazz remained a genre in search of stomping grounds.

Don’t tell that to Joe Vento. An irrepressible bandleader with the coat-o’-many-colors, Vento gathered an impressive big band--featuring hot locals and a few players from the old “Tonight Show”--and brought big band sheen every Tuesday night to the Radisson in Oxnard.

“At first, the management was somewhat apprehensive,” Vento said. “They said ‘how are you going to have 25 to 28 musicians in here? It will be too loud. It will blast everybody out.’ But the people move up from the back to the front so they can hear it better.”

The oasis for jazz in these parts is still Wheeler Hot Springs in Ojai. There, weekends belong to a rotating roster of good players, including occasional appearances by the well-established Milcho Leviev.

Ojai guitarist Raj Rathor came out of the woodwork with his fluent approach to both solo jazz guitar and working in a duet with vocalist Diana Smith.

Wheeler’s periodic Sunday afternoon concert program featured the likes of Dan Hicks, Joe Pass, and Chico Hamilton and Buddy Collette.

World music of a strange and entrancing sort came to a music store near us, via the efforts of Ojai-based Pascal Nabet-Meyer. Nabet-Meyer traveled to the remote island of Rapa Iti to capture a musical tradition at once rooted in the Christian hymn book and primal, microtonal incantations.

The album, “Tahitian Choir,” offers some of the most otherworldly music of all world music projects this year.

And, proudly sitting off to the left end of Ventura’s musical spectrum, there was--and is--Jeff Kaiser.

The new music composer, ringleader, trumpeter-impresario surfaced less often this year than last, when he produced concerts, staged his own “Requiem,” and made other public mischief.

But Kaiser held court at Art City II with his Dada-istic jazz ensemble Maha Cuisinart, and has been working up his next major project, a soon-to-be-unveiled opera, “The Rooster Cries Heresy.”

This year also brought news of the formation of the Ventura County Chamber Orchestra, to be led by the Master Chorale’s Burns Taft. New beginnings usher in new hope.

Right now in Ventura County, there is a potent feeling of there being more to come. Stay tuned.