Music Season Follows a Harmonious Pattern : Ojai Festival in June will serve as the finale. The county scene remains secure, and list of available resources continues to expand.

In Ventura County, the musical calendar ebbs and flows in comforting, reliable patterns.

As it has for many years now, the fall-to-spring season leads up to the finale of the Ojai Festival, the first weekend of June. Eminent conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas, this year’s visiting music director of the Ojai Fest, will effectively cap off the season--however unofficially.

The music scene in the county stays relatively secure, and the list of contenders continues to grow. This past season, the available musical resources expanded to include the Ventura County Symphony, the Conejo Symphony, Los Robles Master Chorale, the Ventura County Master Chorale--which is presenting opera highlights at Ventura College this weekend--and the Ventura Chamber Orchestra, in its first full concert season.

Meanwhile, up in Ojai, the Ojai Camarata, directed by founder Charles McDermott, will be concluding its third season Friday. The concert will feature celebrated violist Donald McInnes on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Flos Campi.” Also on the program are a Bach cantata, Benjamin Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb,” and the “Joyous Processional” by Lou Harrison.

The Asian-influenced Harrison’s music has been making the regional rounds this year. The sound of Harrison was heard in the “Music Alive!” series put on by the Ventura County Symphony and, last month, Harrison was the featured visiting composer of the third annual New Music Festival at UC Santa Barbara.

Harrison, now 77, is one of those worthy American composers who may have finally arrived as an accepted contributor to concert life, after years of life on the fringes of classical repertoire.

On the Ventura County Symphony front, the season, as such, wrapped up with its Tchaikovsky spectacular early in May, but the orchestra makes its last appearance Saturday in the Discovery Artists Concert. The featured soloists, chosen from an audition process last spring, will be violinist Elise Goodman, 13; pianist Jonathan Graehl, 16, and pianist Jeffrey Francom, 18.

In its second official season with Boris Brott at the helm, the symphony extended its sights considerably with the successful “Music Alive!” sub-series, presented in casual settings around the county. Blending world music and 20th-Century classical strains, the series drew healthy audiences and put some provocative cross-cultural sounds into the air.

Of particular note was the “China Alive!” program in Ojai in March, highlighted by Chinese-Canadian composer Alexina Louie’s striking work “Music for a Thousand Autumns.”

The series came to a somewhat uneasy close in April with the “India Alive!” program, in the opulent context of Camarillo’s Spanish Hills Country Club. While the least successful and coherent of the three concerts, the program did include a memorable performance of George Crumb’s enigmatic “Lux Aeterna,” replete with masked musicians and an aura of cool, muted mysticism.

Global cross-talk is inevitable in today’s information-rich world. But finding clear communicative channels between Western and Eastern ways can be risky business.

Still, the general effect of the series was invigorating and lateral-minded, and one we hope to hear much more of.

Freed from the burden of having to impose new and unusual sounds on its subscription audience, the symphony managed to keep up its contemporary music moratorium on the main stage of the Oxnard Civic. The most interesting piece of new music was Miguel del Aguila’s “Toccata,” performed in February.

That said, though, the symphony pulled off another fine season of music-making and helped to expand the area’s musical overview.

MEANWHILE, OFF TO THE LEFT OF CENTER

What would Ventura’s musical season be without a new, outlandish work by can-do independent composer Jeff Kaiser? This year, the enterprising enfant terrible unveiled a chamber opera entitled “Aurea Cantena” (“The Golden Chain”), staged in the Oddfellows Lodge in Ventura on April 30.

New music is notorious for inspiring the sound of only a few hands clapping, but Kaiser’s event attracted nearly a full house to the claustrophobic quarters above the Ventura Bookstore.

In some way, the stuffy venue contributed the generally cramped, hermetic atmosphere of the piece, adapted from ancient alchemical texts by Kaiser and Keith McMullen, and lined with effectively creepy musical means. An abstract patchwork of sound and a thick, soupy libretto added up to a dark theatrical feast.

Kaiser’s oddly fascinating electronic handiwork, some of his most intriguing yet, involved a welter of ambiguous sampled and synthesized sound. In sharp contrast, we heard the refreshing real-time physicality of Jim Connolly’s bass and Deborah Schwartz’s marimba, putting forth avant-bluesy murmurings reminiscent of Captain Beefheart or Tom Waits.

Vocalist Elizabeth Stuart, one of Ventura’s most intrepid and gifted musical regulars, was the sole human presence on a stage swathed in mythic motifs and day-glo kitsch by designer Jeff G. Rack.

One of the evening’s highlights came as a respite from the onslaught of ominousness, an atonal “Gloria” sung with dry passion by Stuart, while Kaiser, off-stage, repeatedly droned “things as they are.” Hence, the singer’s pearly sonorities endured friction from the disembodied, omniscient voice--that of God? Or the composer / trickster incarnate?

On this Saturday night, a blurry cloud of voices and notions hovered about the Oddfellows Lodge, leaving at least one listener both bewildered and enchanted.

Details

* The Ojai Camarata at 8 p.m. Friday at Ojai Presbyterian Church, Foothill Road and Aliso Street. Also at Ventura Episcopal Church, 3290 Loma Vista Road, at 3:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $10 general, $8 students and senior citizens; 646-5030.

* Ventura Symphony “Discovery Artists” concert, at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Oxnard Civic Auditorium, 800 Hobson Way. Tickets $10 to $25; 643-8646.

* Ventura County Master Chorale & Opera Assn. presents “Bravissimo” at the Ventura College theater. Soprano Evelyn De La Rosa will be the guest vocalist. The theater is at 4667 Telegraph Road; 8 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $15. Call 653-7282.