County Symphony Shifts Its Focus to the Contemporary : Miguel del Aguila’s “Toccata” is performed at final concert. And chamber ensemble launches ‘Musics Alive!’ series.

If only in a short, token burst, the Ventura County Symphony descended into the land of the living and emerged triumphant.

The mortals they met there were composers Miguel del Aguila and Mel Powell. Aguila is a gifted composer from Oxnard by way of Uruguay, and North Hollywood-based Powell is the amiable modernist from CalArts by way of jazz, serialism and a Pulitzer Prize.

The verdict: We should do this more often.

The contemporary works came in small but potent doses, leaving a certain hum of electricity over the local classical music scene. Del Aguila’s 1988 piece “Toccata” opened the last official symphony subscription concert, stirring up the calm in the Oxnard Civic Auditorium with its concentric waves of energy and calculated chaos.

The bracing invention of del Aguila’s piece paved the way for the stodgier--if articulately delivered--stuff of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 and Dvorak’s too-familiar “New World Symphony.”

Last week at Ventura’s Poinsettia Pavilion, Powell’s atonal but also beautifully quixotic “Modules: An Intermezzo for Chamber Orchestra” highlighted the kickoff event of the symphony’s “Musics Alive!” series.

This was the first of three cleverly packaged concerts combining modern music with that of various world traditions, and finding elements of East-West crossover. Subsequent concerts will be “China Alive!” at Rancho del Rey in Oak View on March 15 and “India Alive!” at the Spanish Hills Country Club in Camarillo on April 12. Seating is limited to 200 at each concert, so advance planning is advised.

The symphony’s friendly, take-charge music director Boris Brott told the capacity crowd at the pavilion: “If there is no music of today, then we become a museum.”

The mood in the room, anything but museum-like with its arrangement of tables in an arc around the musicians, was one of curiosity seeking and cautious cultural advocacy.

An accomplished chamber ensemble from the symphony fed 20th-Century “serious” music and Indonesian music to an audience not necessarily enamored of either. All left more or less sated.

Fellow moderator Charles McDermott spoke in more direct, dramatic terms against the enemy of the moment--the “dead white European male,” that entity responsible for the bulk of classical repertoire that is played and heard in this conservative era.

But on this night, dead white European males were far from anyone’s mind. For a change.

Opening the program, Stravinsky’s humbly scaled “Eight Instrumental Miniatures for 15 Players” proved to be a cerebral appetizer, teeming with his characteristic blend of modern and primitive, academic and folk sensibilities.

A local angle: It was written in 1962 for Lawrence Morton, the music supporter largely responsible for giving the Ojai Festival an international reputation.

As for Powell, the witty composer and teacher sat with his shock of white hair and a New York Yankees jacket, and discoursed easily about the conceptual basis of his piece.

“In the minute, there is the same architecture as the universal,” he said, and, through his music, demonstrated the relationship of minute details to compositional superstructure.

Although Powell’s musical language descends from the difficult realm of 12-tone theory, he--like Elliott Carter--is one of that field’s more persuasive arbiters. With “Modules,” a hard-to-define Eastern sensibility came through in the key use of silences and coloristic sonic waves.

Tonal activity brushed across the ensemble in mysterious waves, accented by touches of percussion and keyboard filigree. The piece is relatively short, but leaves an indelible impression.

In his between-piece discussion, Brott correctly dubbed “Modules” as romantic, despite its avoidance of consonant tonality. “But it is not romantic in the sense of rhapsodic 19th-Century cliches or hummable melodic fragments. It speaks to the desire for transcendence and embodies an admiration for the parts uniting the whole.”

In the second half, the CalArts Gamelan was led by I Nyoman Wenten in a brief illustration of the Indonesian tradition involving rhythmically hypnotic, microtonally tuned gamelan orchestras of Java and Bali. This is one of the most reliably engaging, time-altering and timeless of world musics, regardless of its status or hipness in world music circles.

In addition to indigenous works, including one with a dancer, the gamelan performed a piece that, of the entire program, most plainly expressed an East-West melding--85-year-old American composer Lou Harrison’s piece for gamelan, and horn and clarinet soloists. The Western soloists sailed plaintive long notes over the gamelan’s percolating bed of rhythm, to seductive effect.

Since long before the Minimalists got hold of it, Harrison has been fascinated by and conversant with Indonesian influences, and has devised enchanting music that gives cross-cultural a good name.

Another kind of cross-cultural bargain was struck in Darius Milhaud’s semi-classic ballet, “La Creation du Monde,” which closed the concert amiably.

This piece is as famous for its story as its sonorities. French composer Milhaud came to the United States in 1922 seeking jazz, the then-revolutionary new sound, and wove together jazz and symphonic influence before our beloved Gershwin did the same with “Rhapsody in Blue.”

So closed a refreshingly variegated and crisply performed concert, with festive, bending blue notes and the spirit of a sassy jazz ensemble. Music is a many-shaped and colored thing, a point that the “Musics Alive!” series seems well-equipped to convey.

Details

* WHAT: “China Alive!” at Rancho del Rey, 655 Burnham Road, Oak View, at 7:30 p.m. March 15. “India Alive!” at the Spanish Hills Country Club, 999 Crestview Ave., Camarillo, at 7:30 p.m. April 12.

* COST: $20.

* FYI: 643-8646.