Birth of an Orchestra : The Ventura County chamber ensemble starts with a fanfare, but some wonder if the new group can weather the recession.

Early last December, somebody gave a party at the Pierpont Inn, and revelers showed up in droves. Gate-crashers raised the intended head count of 75 to more than 200.

A barbershop quartet camped it up by the door. Over by the roast beef table, the Anacapa String Quartet provided an elegant sonic underlining to the bed of social chatter.

This was no innocent company Christmas shindig. The motive: making money and music, and the combination thereof.

This was the first public birth announcement for the area’s latest cultural progeny--the Ventura County Chamber Orchestra, which will have its first concert Jan. 23 at the Ventura College auditorium.

Among the kind words and pleas for contributions, concertmaster Paul Shure took to the podium and told the crowd what they were happy to hear.

“Your community is one with tremendous powers,” said Shure, a Los Angeles resident, but also the concertmaster of the Ventura County Symphony. “It could be the envy of surrounding areas.”

The seeds for the new venture were sown by Ventura College faculty member Burns Taft, who has long nurtured the idea of a chamber orchestra and has found a stronghold of support in its formative stages. All the pieces of the puzzle seem to have fallen into place: the securing of college facilities, the formation of a board, the hiring of mostly Los Angeles-based musicians, the cooperation of donors and volunteers.

The idea seems to be one whose time has come. Still, the prospect of launching so ambitious a cultural ship as an orchestra--albeit the scaled-down frigate of a chamber orchestra--might confound cooler heads. Haven’t these people read the headlines? Don’t they know that we’re in a recession?

But the question remains: Will it fly?

At the Pierpont Inn, which has become chamber orchestra headquarters, board member and innkeeper Rod Houck feels certain it will, and he sees larger implications of the project.

“We feel that the cultural aspect is really important . . . in bringing this community to the place that it should be.”

Santa Paula resident Elena Brokaw came on board as executive director in early November, drawing on her studies of the fine arts at Harvard.

“Normally, it takes two to three years to get something off the ground,” she said, noting the accelerated pace of the orchestra’s organization.

“Yet from the response we’ve gotten so far, it seems as though we’re already full-fledged, and we’re not. We’re just this fledgling organization trying to figure out all the specifics of what we want to do and where we want to be in the community.”

But it hasn’t exactly come from out of the blue, and there are vital signs suggesting that this will be more than another flash in the cultural pan.

Taft comes to the task equipped with both a sturdy musical resume and a high profile in the area. For almost three decades, he has taught at Ventura College. In 1980, Taft took over the dwindling Master Chorale and has gradually polished it, transforming it from an ensemble on the brink of ruin into a solid group.

The concept of positioning the chamber orchestra as an outgrowth of Ventura College follows a familiar pattern. Thiry-one years ago, the Ventura Symphony began at the college as a humble, hopeful ensemble called the Symphonette. Gradually, the orchestra grew increasingly self-sustaining, to the point where it finally severed college ties a few years ago.

When Taft took over the Ventura Master Chorale, that group also used the college as a base.

The next step was the creation of a board of directors. And when looking at credentials, the importance of subsidizing wasn’t overlooked.

“We picked people with business savvy, who were used to pulling in money and were comfortable doing that,” said board member and publicist Beverly Benton. “Our first board had to be a fund-raising board, because that’s how you launch yourself.’

Funding realities create obstacles in birthing an orchestra, or any other large-scale artistic entity. The modest resources that government funds might provide usually aren’t available until the entity has established itself for at least three years.

In addition, ticket sales usually account for about 40% of revenues. “If you wanted to completely fund your nonprofit organization with tickets, they would have to be exorbitant,” Brokaw said.

One of the major fund-raising emphases is on finding donors for individual chairs in the orchestra. And rather than plunge into a full concert season this year, the board decided to take matters slowly, to test the waters of public response. There will be one more concert this year, in April, and then a full season of four concerts beginning next fall.

“We’re funding exactly what we can do,” Benton said. “We’ve already funded our first concert, so we’re already in the black.”

In this early stage of its active life, the orchestra founders haven’t been greeted only by goodwill.

One of the less-than-enthusiastic voices on the subject is the Ventura County Symphony itself. The symphony fears that the creation of an entirely new orchestra entity in town will incite competition for money and audiences.

“I don’t want to go head to head with them,” said symphony Executive Director Karine Beesley. “They have chosen to create an orchestra in a very, very difficult economic climate with an arts community that has traditionally been viewed as being splintered.”

The symphony’s own schedule next season will include chamber music events. Confused public perception has taken root already. “Because they’re called the Ventura County Chamber Orchestra,” Beesley noted, “we’ve gotten a lot of calls asking for information.”

Furthermore, according to Beesley, there were negotiations between Boris Brott, conductor of the symphony, and Taft to create a chamber orchestra under the symphony’s auspices. They failed to yield results, she said, because the chamber orchestra was already in organizational midstream and its artistic director and board chose to be autonomous.

“We have worked hard trying to create and to present a cohesive arts community that does work together and, in fact, is very interested in collaborative ventures. When you feel like you’ve offered an organization something valuable and they turn you down, it’s disappointing.

“I’m torn about how I feel personally about it. I certainly don’t wish them ill. I don’t want them to be unsuccessful, but I wish we could be successful together and that we could present a collaborative front on this.”

Raise the subject of the chamber orchestra’s relationship to the Ventura County Symphony, and lips tighten, words become measured.

“We feel that we’ll actually be a boon to the symphony, because it will be another form of culture that can spring up,” said chamber orchestra board member Rod Houck.

Taft echoed Houck’s assertion. “From what I’ve seen, I think it’s been pretty much new money we’ve been raising. These are new people. I hope that’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. We want to improve the arts all around.”

This weekend, as Taft strikes up the band in servings of Bach, Rachmaninov, and Tchaikovsky, with pianist John Novacek and Ventura soprano Katherine O’Hara as soloists, the first phase of Ventura’s brave new orchestra will be made manifest.

As for the rest, time and the till will tell.