SOUNDS : Season Is Here for Gifts, Good Cheer--and Choral Music : Before getting into holiday spirit, the Ventura Master Chorale presented two concert operas in a delightful setting.

Come the Christmas season, choral music reaches its peak resonance.

Communal vocalizing is a time-honored tradition at Christmas, from caroling to “Messiah” sing-alongs to the ample liturgical repertoire for the season. Underlying that tradition is a seeming instinct to gather and make joyful noise, as part of the holiday experience.

It happens like clockwork right here in Ventura County, which boasts two viable, well-equipped chorales as well as other vocal enterprises. The next two weekends bring respectable holiday programs from the Los Robles Master Chorale (nee the Moorpark Masterworks Chorale) and the Ventura County Master Chorale.

For those with a do-it-yourself penchant and/or a fondness for Handel’s Christmas classic, a trip to the “Messiah” sing-along Dec. 19 in Simi Valley would be a suitable pilgrimage.

This weekend’s program by the Los Robles Master Chorale amounts to the seasonal debut of a veteran entity. Same group, new name.

After 15 years as the Moorpark Masterworks Chorale, director James Stemen decided to broaden the limited regional implications of his group’s handle. A program of music by Bach, Buxteheide, Flor Peeters, Daniel Pinkham, and others will feature the full Master Chorale, the Chamber Singers, and the Amadeus Boys Choir.

This is the first of four concerts in the group’s season, culminating in a tour of Scotland and England next summer.

VICTORIAN POP TARTS

Veering slightly off its traditional course, the Ventura County Master Chorale kicked off its four-concert season last month with a program entitled “Victoriana: Concert Operas in a Victorian Setting.” The setting in question was the quaint Victorian Rose Historical Wedding Chapel on Main Street in Ventura, and the music in question was two one-act melodramatic confections by Kurt Weill and Gilbert and Sullivan, respectively.

Between the Disneyesque wiles and truncated scale of the chapel and the melodramatic cheekiness of the musical material, there was no getting around the kitsch of the event. But therein lay the charm. It was a site-specific marriage--of material and venue--made in heaven.

Ventura-based composer John Biggs lent his lucid, sonorous voice to the task of narrating Weill’s “Down in the Valley,” written for school choir in 1945. As Biggs commented in his pre-performance remarks, Weill, who fled his native Germany in 1933, “assimilated our musical culture completely.”

Actually, assimilation and iconoclasm worked in Weill’s favor, especially in this marginal but entertaining piece. Americana turns sweet and sour, by turns, with the most affecting moments going to the sour end of the spectrum.

Within the purplish tale of forbidden love and in a place called Shadow Creek (dark, valley-of-death angles abound here), the recurring “Down in the Valley” theme is tossed and turned inventively.

At its finest, at the end of the work, the theme is cloaked in strained chromatic lines and wends its way toward a consonant resolution, a romantic resignation. At a potent musical moment like this, the mawkishness of the scenario is a moot point.

The cast tackled its material with an infectious gusto, with big tones coming from Mariane Dibblee as Jennie Pearson, centerpiece of the crimes of passion and pangs of longing. Villainous to a fault, a suitably arch Rick Fessenden, as the courting predator Thomas Bouche, arrived clad in black and greeted by hisses in the house.

Clearly standing out in the cast, though, was guest tenor Nmon Ford-Livene as the woe begotten, doomed lover Brack Weaver. With his bold, articulate delivery, Ford-Livene effectively stole the show, from a purely vocal standpoint.

But then, Weill’s work aspires to qualities of vernacular theater that is beyond (or below) purely vocal or purely musical attributes.

Even less purely musical was the concert’s second half, belonging to the Gilbert and Sullivan-ia of “Trial by Jury.” Satirical froth and an unrelieved air of flippancy is stirred up from the outset in this sendup of courtroom proceedings involving an aggrieved bride, a philandering husband and a wily judge.

Featured singers, willing and able froth-mongers all, included Joe Ehlinger as the “learned judge”; Karen Medrano as Angelina; and as Edwin, the Defendant, Grey Brothers, who sang the roustabout with great relish and expressive eyebrow gyrations.

As they did in “Down in the Valley,” Master Chorale members performed chorus duties with heft and precision, disguised as the jury and other hangers-on.

No major musical epiphanies occurred in the November season-opener, but a good time was had by all who knew what they were in for. Bouncing from the sublime to varying shades of the ridiculous, from dark to light, has long been the trajectory of the Ventura County Master Chorale.

For its Christmas fare, for instance, the Ventura County Master Chorale is presenting “Buon Natale, a Holiday with Italian Masters,” in Camarillo and at the Ventura Mission on successive days. Featuring music by Pergolesi, Vivaldi and Respighi, the program promises to be substantial presentation rather than a fruitcake.

Details

* Los Robles Master Chorale, “Christmas Celebration Concerts,” Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 4 p.m.; Ascension Lutheran Church, 1600 Hillcrest Drive, Thousand Oaks. 378-1453.

* Ventura County Master Chorale, “Buon Natale, a Holiday with Italian Masters,” Dec. 11 at 8 p.m.; at Mt. Cross Lutheran Church, 102 Camino Esplendido in Camarillo; Dec. 12 at 4 and 8 p.m. at the San Buenaventura Mission, 211 E. Main St., Ventura, 653-7282.

* Community “Messiah” Sing-along, Dec. 19 at 7 p.m., Church of Latter-day Saints, corner of Sinaloa and Highland roads, Simi Valley, 583-1127.