Piano Forte

There was a time, a few years back, when the name Miguel del Aguila was ubiquitous on the Ventura County music scene. After all, the gifted Uruguayan-born composer, who won the coveted Kennedy Friedheim Prize in 1995, had called Oxnard home for several years by then.

Last June, his music made a brief appearance on the scene, when the Ventura Master Chorale premiered his piece “Trobodours,” but that was nothing compared to busier seasons here.

On Tuesday, however, you can hear the local artist speak about his musical life-in-progress at the Laurel Theatre as part of the Focus on the Masters series of lectures there.

Other ways to hear what Del Aguila has been up to lately are to check out your local music outlet or online sources. Del Aguila’s music has been showing up on numerous recordings. His relative inactivity at home recently is perhaps directly linked to his activity away.

Celebrated pianist Gloria Cheng chose to cap off her fine new CD, “Piano Dance: A 20th-Century Portrait,” on Telarc, with Del Aguila’s deliciously, and eventually deliriously, energetic piece “Conga.”

An orchestral version of the piece, “Conga Line in Hell,” was heard in the county a few years back, but the piano version is a vivid entity unto itself, given a lucid, sympathetic reading by Cheng.

To hear the orchestral model, check out the CD “Batata-Coco, an Anthology of Musical Diversity in the Americas,” performed by the Camerata de Las Americas on the Conculta label. The textures are thicker, of course, and the composer’s clever scheme of mounting, swirling intensity--ending with a mambo-like tympani part--is hotter than in the piano version, but both have their undeniable charms.

Del Aguila wrote “Pacific Serenade,” which opens the new “eXchange: Latin America” album on CRI, for the “Pacific Serenades” concert series in 1998. That Los Angeles-based series often focuses on kinder, gentler, more tonal contemporary music where new pieces are concerned.

Del Aguila fulfilled the mission but also tucked in a bit of his innate sense of irony, as suggested in the clever title--as in pacific, the adjective--and named after the commissioning body. Still, this is one of the more unabashedly sweet pieces in Del Aguila’s canon, an abidingly melodic work, played with polish by clarinetist Gary Gray, violinists Miwako Watanabe and Connie Kupka, violist Simon Oswell and cellist David Speltz. It’s a calm walk in a flower garden before the cerebral storm--in the best sense--on the rest of the compilation.

Among other things, Del Aguila is gaining a deserved reputation for his piano music, which partly relates to the fact of the composer’s own potent skills as a pianist. Two of his solo piano pieces close the CD “20th Century Dances and Improvisations for Piano,” performed by James Miltenberger for the Scotwood Music label. Miltenberger, like Cheng, closes the CD with “Conga,” which appears to be a good capper.

The other Del Aguila piece is “Music in a Bottle,” written in 1999, which has a swaying, querulous chordal pattern that first seems to evoke the varied influences of Satie and Glass. Other musical suggestions drift like an aroma out of the “bottle” of the composition, including a tangy, slightly dissonant tango and a ballad with reservations about its own feelings of tenderness.

Del Aguila’s music, pretty to behold and contemporary in outlook, tends to involve subplots and self-questioning tactics. It’s rewarding to listen to this locally based composer’s work in the comfort of one’s own home, if not the comfort of our regional music venues.

DETAILS

An Evening with Miguel del Aguila, at the Laurel Theatre, 1006 E. Main St. in Ventura; 7 p.m. Tuesday; $8 general, free to members of the Focus on the Masters; 649-9366.

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