Out & About / Ventura County : classical / jazz : Rise and Shine : L.A. Philharmonic delivers an invigorating wake-up call on season.

The orchestral season in Ventura County, as defined by the New West and Conejo Valley symphonies, doesn’t begin until early October. But lovers of orchestra music, those of us who believe that the form’s spatial splendor has to be heard live for the best effect, got a profound taste of the orchestral elixir last week.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the acclaimed conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the past six years, brought his lustrous band up to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza for the first performance in Ventura County since Salonen took charge. The L.A. Phil, elevated to a new status among international orchestras in recent years, makes its HQ at the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles, little more than a half hour from Thousand Oaks but a world away in terms of quality.

It was a momentous occasion on a few fronts, not the least of which is that, with luck, the Philharmonic will see fit to make this the first of many a return visit up the highway to perform here. This fall is also a final stretch of sorts for Salonen the public figure, as he begins a yearlong sabbatical come 2000 to write an opera.

And then, of course, there was the music itself, a deceptively broad program, of Mahler’s bucolic Symphony No. 1 and Bach--but Bach revisited by 20th century iconoclasts.

The centerpiece of the program ostensibly was the Mahler symphony, taking up the second half of the concert, given a masterful and suitably varied reading here.

Salonen led the orchestra over Mahler’s largely kind-spirited landscape with his usual stern but flexible hand, from the gradual awakening, the sense of dawning in the opening movement, to the jarring contrast of the last movement’s stormy passages. In the end, what begins idyllically ends with a hint of Mahlerian angst to come in his later music.

Mahler symphonies tend to lord over a concert program, but in some way, the most exciting piece on this evening was also its shortest and quirkiest--Bach revisited and rescored by Anton Webern.

Arguably, 12-tone pioneer and pedagogue Arnold Schoenberg was outshone in terms of actual musical output by his famous students, Berg and Webern. And certainly, on this concert program, Webern’s radical reworking of Bach’s “Ricercar” proved a more intriguing, ear-opening concoction than Schoenberg’s version of Bach’s “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue, sometimes verging on the overly lush.

Webern’s piece dissects the wandering, contrapuntal lines of the original Bach piece and, without actually changing any notes, passes fragments around the orchestra, creating a kind of textural kaleidoscope. The effect is weird, to be sure, but also invigorating and abstracting.

In a sense, one could relate the music to the distorting process of Cubism in the visual arts, in which multiple perspectives are represented simultaneously. In this fascinating endeavor, the analytical process of reworking Bach brings the music closer to the objective, cerebral nature of the serial music launched by Schoenberg and his pupils. Old and new get along surprisingly well.

The same could be said of the L.A. Phil’s musical agenda under Salonen, doing much to breed excitement into local orchestral life, controversy be damned. Hopefully, they will see fit to put Ventura County on the map of their “community” concerts.

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Jazz on the Beach: The 11th annual Santa Barbara Jazz Festival, the strongest one in its history, reaches its apex this weekend with a sturdy lineup on the sand at Leadbetter Beach.

As in years past, the festival becomes a fenced-in, musical encampment on the beach, lined with food and other vendors. But the big news this year is that the musical programming has been ratcheted up a few notches in quality. Pianist and restaurateur Peter Clark took over the festival last year and vowed to improve it, bringing more bona fide jazz and name brand headliners to the roster. He also wanted to spread the festival around town, to the showcase SohO, which featured New Yorker guitarist-deserving-wider-recognition Wayne Krantz this week, and the Lobero Theater.

Tonight at the Lobero, mainstream jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell plays, while a swing dance party takes over the Leadbetter beach site. Saturday’s beach schedule has a Latin-jazz focus.

Santa Barbara’s fest-within-a-fest will be headlined by Tito Puente and includes the Buena Vista Social Club’s Eliades Ochoa, direct from Cuba.

Also on hand will be pianist-composer Lalo Schifrin (playing excerpts of his new “Latin-Jazz Suite,” premiered in Los Angeles last weekend), Oxnard’s own Latin-jazz royalty, the Estrada Brothers, percussionist Francisco Aguabella and others.

Sunday at the beach, the lineup includes Les McCann--long a favorite at this festival, whose trumpeter, Jeff Elliott, is a local hero--a “Director’s Jam” led by Clark, singer Barbara Morrison, trumpeter Bill Berry, and, to close, the wit-lined singer-songwriter-pianist Mose Allison.

DETAILS

Santa Barbara Jazz Festival, at the Lobero Theater on Friday and Saturday nights, and at Ledbetter Beach on Saturday and Sunday, in Santa Barbara. Lobero Theater, 33 Canon Perdido St. in Santa Barbara, Festival info: 969-5038 (www.sbjazz.com).