A Year of High Notes

It may seem hidden at times in the shadow of the metropolis to the south, but Ventura County has a healthy and hip jazz and classical music scene. If you need proof, look back at the musical calendar for 2000.

We have a solid, dynamic orchestra--by any standards--in the New West Symphony, even if its repertory has recently taken a conservative lean. Conductor Boris Brott, whose international reputation has been growing, has done wonders in his seven years at the helm.

The New West also contributes its share to the local new music calendar with its “Musics Alive” series, which last spring included a toast to Cuban emigre composer Tania Leon.

Composers based in Ventura County also made valuable contributions to the area’s musical canvas. Uruguayan-born composer Miguel del Aguila’s presence in the county has lightened in recent years, although his reputation has broadened internationally. This year, his music could be heard on several new CDs, including the capper on pianist Gloria Cheng’s recording “Piano Dance” (Telarc). Locally, del Aguila’s new piece “Trobodours,” was premiered by the Ventura Master Chorale in June.

The same ensemble slipped a surprise into this month’s Christmas concert at the San Buenaventura Mission, with the premiere of director Burns Taft’s short but evocative work, “Eclipse: Part 1.” Many in the area know Taft as a champion and conductor of a variety of music--choral, chamber and otherwise--but his composition, at once sonorous and structurally adventurous, piqued curiosity about the hidden, inner composer.

The most ambitious local premiere of the year came from the pen of Ventura composer John Biggs. Biggs followed his earlier success, a musical theater adaptation of “The Importance of Being Ernest” called “Ernest Worthing,” with his first bona fide opera, “Hobson’s Choice,” presented in a humbly scaled but fully engaging production by the Ventura College Opera Workshop.

More regionally generated music news occurred this fall when Emma Lou Diemer, a noted composer and organist based in Santa Barbara, premiered the full version of her Mass with the Ojai Camerata. The camerata had previously presented snippets of the full opus, through various regimes over the last several years.

We have festivals to brag about in the county, the grandest and hoariest being, of course, the Ojai Festival. This year the list of maestros given the music directorship grew to include one of the greatest living conductors, Sir Simon Rattle.

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The Ventura Chamber Music Festival, in its fifth annual edition last May, continued its steady upward growth. Guitarist Sharon Isbin and pianist Christopher O’Riley, playing Stravinsky, were among the festival highlights.

The Moorpark Choral Festival, sponsored by the Los Robles Master Chorale, held its second annual event, also in the spring.

Up Santa Barbara way, two small but mighty festivals remain memorable. Santa Barbara Symphony conductor Giselle Ben-Dor’s brave Silvestre Revueltas Festival last January continued her advocacy of the late, iconoclastic genius from Mexico. And the UCSB New Music Festival hosted an appearance by the remarkable Esbjerg Ensemble from Denmark, along with a residency by the fascinating Danish composer Bent Sorensen, a creative voice deserving wider recognition.

Beyond the Chamber Music Festival’s annual 10-day feast, this form of music generally gets its due in Ventura, thanks to the always-enticing Camerata Pacifica series in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Thousand Oaks. There’s a new kid in town, as well, the Ventura Chamber Music Series, founded by Newton and Vonice Friedman, which kicked off in November with a Copland-oriented program at Ventura City Hall. It continues Jan. 13 with pianist Mikhail Voskresensky.

In jazz, there was another solid year of nightclub action at 66 California, which has become one of Southern California’s sturdiest haunts.

Isolating one event from a healthy, if sporadic year, in music is risky business, but for this columnist, that scintillating moment may have come courtesy of a certain Dutch drummer. Han Bennink is a veteran from Amsterdam best known for his improvisational and almost dadaistic abandon. But he’s also a master percussionist, with jazz chops galore.

His solo concert this fall at Ventura City Hall, the highlight of the pfMENTUM new music concert series, left some of us simultaneously gasping and guffawing. He ended his set by “playing” the floor and walking up the aisle and out the door. It amounted to the most surreal moment of the music year in Ventura, with a tall, loony visionary standing outside the glass door, holding his drumsticks and staring in at his adoring, agreeably befuddled crowd.

Important musical figures who passed on this year: conductor/teacher Frank Salazar, the dean of the scene here, who founded the Ventura Symphony (precursor to the New West Symphony) and jazz-blues-rock guitar hero Larry Nass, whose resume includes the unique “fusion” group, Eraserheads and the R&B; Bombers. They will be missed, but their gifts are duly appreciated and are integrally woven into Ventura’s musical fabric.

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Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.