Chamber of Delights

Delicate balancing and filling niches are the keys to the ongoing success of the Ventura Chamber Music Festival, which kicks off this weekend with several concerts.

The festival has made an impressive showing both by thinking small--the natural order of chamber music--and thinking big, in terms of the cultural import of its programming.

The festival is just a bit behind the beat with its Bach focus, coming a year after the celebratory wave of attention on the 250th anniversary of the composer’s 1750 death. But Bach is ever a welcome visitor to modern concert programs.

And despite the festival’s umbrella moniker, “Transcendent Bach,” his music is scattered only sparingly through the festival, including a concert subtitled “Bach’s Circle in Concert” on Thursday. But we will get a chance to hear two of his acknowledged masterpieces--the “Goldberg Variations,” played on harpsichord by Edward Murray, Sunday afternoon at Ventura City Hall, and the B Minor Mass, performed in the Ventura Theatre May 12.

Classical guitar has been a mainstay of this festival from the outset, and the dazzling guitarist Pepe Romero will make his debut here, both in a recital tonight at Community Presbyterian Church and in concert with the Rossetti String Quartet on Saturday night at the Serra Center at the San Buenaventura Mission.

Cesar Mateus, a young composer who has been teaching at Ventura College for the past few years, will be one of the composers presenting world premieres this year. His work will be unveiled at a concert by Bryan Pezzone and Friends on Saturday afternoon at the Church of Religious Science.

These are but a few of the highlights in a festival that has become a centerpiece of Ventura’s cultural calendar.

DETAILS

The Ventura Chamber Music Festival, through May 13. This weekend’s concerts: “Tea and Trumpets,” 3 p.m. today at the Bella Maggiore Inn, 67 S. California St. Tickets $45. Pepe Romero recital, 8 p.m. today at Community Presbyterian Church, 1555 Poli St. Tickets $20-35. “Bach to Jazz,” Bryan Pezzone and Friends, 2 p.m. Saturday at the Church of Religious Science, 101 S. Laurel St. Tickets $15 adults, $8 students. The Rosetti String Quartet, with Pepe Romero, 8 p.m. Saturday at the San Buenaventura Mission’s Serra Center, 211 E. Main St. Tickets $28 and $35. Harpsichordist Edward Murray, “The Goldberg Variations,” 2 p.m. Sunday at Ventura City Hall, 501 Poli St. Tickets $30. The Empire Brass, 7 p.m. Sunday at Ventura High School, 2155 E. Main St. Tickets $20-30. For tickets and information, call 648-3146 or visit https://www.vcmfa.org.

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Heading North: In other festival news, the brave and often hardy UCSB New Music festival presented its 10th annual edition last week, largely to the tune of contemporary Polish music. Over the course of five concerts, the finale of which was a loose symposium-concert on Sunday that explored the effect of indigenous folk music on composition in Poland, the festival did what it has done best over its history--shed light on corners of the contemporary music scene too little known hereabout.

Thursday’s concert included music by guest composers Wlodzimierz Kotonski and Marta Ptaszynska, and Friday night Polish cello virtuoso Jakub Omsky, now a Santa Barbara resident, put on a rousing and determinedly eclectic concert.

Sunday afternoon featured a symposium-concert about the interaction of folk music, nationalism and spirituality in Polish music. It was organized by UCSB’s Tim Cooley, who was involved in the remarkable compilation of vintage Polish mountain fiddle recordings, “Fire in the Mountains,” on the Yazoo label.

Upfront and center, though, was visiting composer and pianist Zygmunt Krauze, whose musical vision, both as composer and performer, left an indelible imprint. Moreover, Krauze’s presence embodied one aspect that has made this festival so significant and rare. He is an important composer on the international scene, and a close encounter with his music had an air of discovery.

In both a solo piano recital Wednesday and an all-Krauze chamber music concert Saturday, he demonstrated the different facets of his musical persona: an experimentalist during the ‘70s and, after a creative conversion in the ‘80s, a member of the new mystical style of composing, comparable to such composers as the Polish Henryk Gorecki, Estonian Arvo Part and Georgian Giya Kancheli. He is also a pianist with a dazzling touch and understanding of contemporary aesthetics, who ended his wildly diverse, memorable piano recital with an encore of Chopin that he poetically dismantled before our ears.

Saturday’s concert integrated ideas from the composer’s two periods, from elements of chance (John Cage was a seminal inspiration for Krauze) and theater, and his new brand of detached, cool emotionality. Audacity is not its own reward for Krauze, whose conceptual pieces can be both amusing and disarmingly introspective.

In his later pieces, “Quatuor pour la naissance” (1985), and 1993’s rightfully renowned Piano Quintet, earnest and downright beautiful melodic materials are stitched with a beguiling looseness of assembly that blockades sentimentality. Chopin meets Cage, on a new kind of musical playing field. Suffice to say, we could stand to hear a lot more of Krauze’s music and are blessed to have had a dose of it in this area code.