Ventura Chamber Festival Has Lofty Goals, Low-Key Charm

Since its beginnings seven years ago, the Ventura Chamber Music Festival has pursued an unpretentious and slightly radical agenda, combining classical music propriety and a casual context. Free refreshments are touted, applause often erupts between movements, and the festival encourages a general atmosphere of seriousness with crumbs on the lapel. The formula works, and the festival is a Ventura highlight.

It tends to unfold all over town, as happened during its opening weekend. Saturday night at Mission San Buenaventura’s Serra Center, the Rossetti String Quartet performed with guest guitarist Pepe Romero, who had given a recital Friday at the Community Presbyterian Church. Sunday afternoon, in the reverberant foyer of Ventura City Hall, Edward Murray essayed Bach’s Goldberg Variations on harpsichord, and the Empire Brass Quintet brought its virtuosity and high jinks to the Ventura High School auditorium Sunday night.

The Rossetti, in residence at UC Santa Barbara, is a highly gifted group, one to keep tabs on. Here, it displayed polish on Haydn’s Quartet in G, Opus 76, No. 1, and agreeable, forgettable snippets of film music by composer Gabriel Yared. Occasional intonation warbles were perhaps explained by the room’s challenged ventilation. Romero, and Carissa Romero on castanets, joined for Boccherini’s Quintet No. 4 for guitar and strings, with the guitarist less a soloist than part of the fabric. The quartet found its true stride on Dvorak’s Quartet in E-flat, Opus 521, inhabiting that composer’s world with ease and insight.

In this post-Glenn Gould era of personalized Goldberg Variations on the piano, it’s refreshing to return to the source: the harpsichord. Murray played the 32 segments with humble, virtuosic clarity, in a performance that fits the festival’s 2001 moniker: “Transcendent Bach” (though little Bach will be played over the festival’s two weeks of performances).

The Empire Brass, led by dazzling trumpeter Rolf Smedvig, brings brass ensemble repertory to new heights, adapting material and producing an impeccable sound. Sunday’s crowd-pleasing smorgasbord of a program surveyed familiar tunes of Prokofiev, Dvorak and De Falla, but also checked in with introspective jewels by Debussy and Satie. Not immune to shtick, it also offered a New Orleans-esque bit of Beethoven. An encore of Bernstein’s music from “On the Waterfront,” with its muscular harmonies and obstacle course of rhythmic accents, ended things on a bracing note.

* The Ventura Chamber Music Festival continues through May 13. (805) 648-3146.