Choices in Voices

This weekend’s concert roster amounts to a harmonic convergence of vocal-based music for Ventura County. Between the New West Symphony’s staging of Puccini’s “Tosca,” a Los Robles Master Chorale program featuring British conductor David Willcocks and another provocative program from the Ojai Camerata, the options for music lovers are many.

The New West Symphony has made a commitment to opera in its four-year history, with annual nods to the passionate and logistically challenging art form, in varying degrees of spectacle.

This year’s “Tosca” is an evolutionary step up, the first time the New West will present a fully staged opera. Daniel Helfgot, who regularly works with Opera San Jose and the Music Academy of the West during the summer, will direct.

Center stage, Alison Charney, who has sung with the New York City Opera and has specialized in the world of Puccini, will be in the lead role, as the stormy soprano under sociopolitical duress in 19th century Italy. Tenor Benjamin Bongers plays the painter Mario Cavaradossi and baritone Nmon Ford-Livene is Scarpia, the sinister chief of police.

All in all, it promises to be an important event in the county, where opera has been down but hardly out. Later this month, the Ventura Opera Workshop will offer a staging of Aaron Copland’s rarely performed “The Tender Land” at Ventura College.

Opera-philes, mark your calendars.

British Invasion: The Los Robles Master Chorale, meanwhile, leans toward the British musical world in its upcoming program, when founding conductor James Stemen loans the podium to guest conductor Willcocks.

The program, called “Treasures of England,” surveys the celebrated choral music of composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Parry, Charles Stanford and other British sources. Joining the Master Chorale will be the Los Robles Children’s Choir and the Conejo Valley Symphony.

Camerata Explorations: Since composer Miguel del Aguila took over the baton as director of the Ojai Camerata last season, the group’s programming has been anything but predictable.

The group has performed unearthed obscurities, enlightened oddities, and--we must not forget--the director’s own wild chamber opera invention, “Composer Missing.”

This weekend, del Aguila leads his singing charges into terrain at once familiar and offbeat.

The concert’s punning title, “VocaLiszt . . . and piano,” tells all. Franz Liszt is the composer of the moment on the program, but mostly represented in his lesser-known function as a composer of choral music.

The Camerata will perform pieces from Liszt’s liturgical writing, Pater Noster, Requiem, Missa Choralis and Ave Verum.

On more traditionally Lisztian pianistic turf, soloist Ornela Ervin will perform such chestnuts as the “Mephisto Waltz” and “Liebestraum.”

DETAILS

“Tosca,” the New West Symphony, today at 8 p.m. at the Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd. in Thousand Oaks, and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center, 800 Hobson Way. Tickets are $12-$55; 497-5880.

“Treasures of England,” the Los Robles Master Chorale, with guest conductor David Willcocks, Saturday at St. Paschal Baylon Catholic Church, 155 E. Janss Road in Thousand Oaks. Tickets are $15 general admission, $12 seniors, $10 for students and children; 522-8163.

“VocaLizst . . . and piano,” the Ojai Camerata, 8 tonight at Ventura First United Methodist Church, 1338 E. Santa Clara St.; and Saturday at Ojai Presbyterian Church, 304 N. Foothill Road. Tickets are $12 adults, $9 students and seniors; 289-4890.