Reprise of Del Aguila Closes Camerata Season

The Bach Camerata closed another brief-but-beefy season Sunday night in the acoustically friendly Forum Theatre of Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

A Santa Barbara-based ensemble, which imports great players from Los Angeles, the Camerata continues to bring good chamber music to the tri-counties. The group performs in three locations--the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, the Ventura City Hall and the Forum Theatre--for six separate programs packed into a two-month season.

The mandate of the Camerata is to survey a wide range of music and devote some space to obscurities and new music. This season included the complete Brandenburg Concertos and Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.”

For its final program of the season, the Camerata reprised a work that it commissioned and premiered last season: Miguel del Aguila’s Wind Quintet No. 2, which was honored with the Kennedy Center’s Friedheim Award last fall. The quintet holds up beautifully under repeat listenings, which are a novelty in the new music sphere, where world premieres are often also final performances.

Like much of the Oxnard-based del Aguila’s music, it’s an adventurous and sometimes experimental piece, requiring musicians to extend techniques, to move to far corners of the hall and to hum. But it’s also melodious and sweet-natured.

The movement entitled “Far Away” deploys quasi-Middle Eastern tonalities, shimmering arpeggios and a lonesome horn melody that harks back to the folk-songish opening movement. Above all, the quintet is an evocatively impressionistic display, all about winds and wind.

The remainder of the 2 1/2-hour program wasn’t as compelling, even if it earned points on the esoterica scale. Classical-cum-Romantic composer Johann Hummel’s Septet was robust, bordering on the abrasive. Pianist Joanne Pearce Martin handled her fistful of notes deftly.

Opening the second half, Hungarian composer Erno von Dohnanyi’s Sextet in C is a heavy meal, slathered in neo-Romantic gravy. It was written in 1935, a leftover from the previous century.

Salvaging the evening, the Camerata closed with a tasty little morsel, Bohuslav Martinu’s ballet “La Revue de Cuisine.” A wittily surreal piece based on dancing kitchen utensils, the score is an engagingly frothy, jazz-fueled treat. Chalk up another fine season for a group worth watching for.

Kinder, Gentler Immortality: Beethoven’s legacy made its annual visit to Ventura County last weekend, as the New West Symphony offered two performances of the program dubbed “Beethoven! The Immortal Beloved.” Fortunately, the kitsch in the title was overwhelmed by the musical offerings, including a moving performance from pianist Anton Kuerti.

As is discernible from the concert’s rather shameless title, this presentation was driven partly by the composer’s tortured mythology, which has recently been fueled by Hollywood. Saturday night at the Oxnard Civic Auditorium, actor Terry Lester read the composer’s letters to his enigmatic inamorata and to his brothers, to whom he bared his soul over his impending deafness.

The peripheral verbiage from the stage proved both intriguing and a bit distracting. Words can have a nasty way of getting in the way of music.

Beethoven’s Overture to Prometheus served as a throat-clearing concert-opener, segueing into the Sixth Symphony, the “Pastorale.” There is scarcely a tortured bone to be found in the body of this symphony, except for the brief troubled churning of the “storm” passage--the better to sweeten the final resolution of this nature-loving opus.

Beethoven’s Sixth is one of those warm-bath experiences in the orchestral repertoire, into which a listener can safely sink. If the ensemble on hand is sensitive to the materials--which this orchestra, under Boris Brott’s sure hand, was--a wash of emotion can be expected.

For the concert’s second half, the impressive pianist Kuerti, dressed in a white coat, amply showed what he, as well as Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, were made of. Kuerti is, by definition, masterly, and here he offered immaculate phrases and an assured sense of the bigger picture in the work.

The most emotionally baring moments came in the beginning of the second movement, with its frictional dialogue between blaring orchestral assertions and the tender reflections from the piano. Gradually, a dynamic accord is made between soloist and ensemble, and the path is cleared for a Vivace which was, in Oxnard, roundly vivacious.

Brott has established a few traditions since his arrival as head of the Ventura County Symphony a few years ago. His seemingly annual Beethoven feast, now carried over to the New West regime, is one of his finer ideas.