Notable Choices

Oxnard-based, internationally accredited composer Miguel del Aguila has made a local reputation for himself out of strong music-making, outspoken ideals and enfant terrible tendencies.

He often seems to be nipping at the status quo, as he did with his premieres last season, including the absurd comic opera “Composer Missing.” Someone’s got to do it.

In a different way, Del Aguila was up to some subversive old tricks last weekend when the Ojai Camerata kicked off its second season under his guidance.

This time, the radical gesture had to do with dusting off an unjustly obscure 200-year-old piece of music and offering it to audiences in Ventura and Ojai in an affectionate performance.

Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842) is not a name that rushes to the tongue when we think of great composers, but, as the promotional materials point out, his passionate and stylistically prescient Requiem was performed at the funeral of his great admirer, Beethoven.

As shown right here in Ventura County, this is a fascinating piece of music deserving wider recognition.

Strangely, the concert opened with what seemed largely to be irrelevant filler.

On the plus side, we heard short, engaging duet pieces by Manuel de Falla, nicely played by pianist Karen Corbett and cellist Virginia Kron (who just the night before at UCSB had played very different duet music, by post-serialist composer William Kraft).

The Camerata also dipped into kitsch for such Latin bonbons as “Tico Tico”--visions of Carmen Miranda dancing in our heads--and “Brazil”--visions of Terry Gilliam tromping through our psyches.

Needless to say, the serious portion of the program began after intermission, and the Camerata did an admirable job of bringing the Requiem to musical life.

Cherubini’s choral work was performed with an eight-piece instrumental ensemble including gong and tympany (and at Ventura’s Church of Religious Science on Friday night, a sampled organ, unfortunately, instead of the real thing). he piece commences with a passionate yet controlled solemnity, but it moves into rich, uplifting terrain along its hourlong path. It closes, again on a somber note, with an ethereal sustained fundamental tone held over repeating phrases in the strings, and murmuring tympany rolls. In the end, like the finest Requiems, it affirms life through the prism of its reverential meditation on death.

Apart from the throat-clearing first half, it was a solid, enlightening start for the Camerata’s sparse but enticing three-concert season.

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Gershwinia: For anyone who pays attention to concert schedules and music store bins, it’s hard to avoid the fact that this is the year of Gershwin, being the centennial of his birth. It’s not as though Gershwin, one of America’s most rightly deified songsmiths, has ever been far from the surface of our national musical life, but the big 1-0-0 is a fine excuse to plunge headlong into Gershwin lore.

And the celebration takes place in various corners of the music world, thanks to the composer’s broad grasp of pop, jazz and classical qualities.

The New West Symphony joins in the tribute fever this weekend with its own Gershwin program, with concerts in Thousand Oaks and Oxnard. The respected pianist Alan Feinberg, who has done a lot of work enlivening 20th century music, will be the guest soloist on hand to perform the “Piano Concerto in F” and “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Maestro Boris Brott will strike up the overture to “Strike Up the Band,” “Lullaby” and Robert Russell Bennett’s arrangement of “Porgy and Bess--a Symphonic Picture.”

* New West Symphony, tonight at 8 at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd. Thousand Oaks, and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center, 100 Hobson Way in Oxnard. Tickets are $12-$55; (805) 486-2424.