Chamber of Delights

Chamber music may stand a better chance of survival in musical hard times, partly because, to mix cliches, it travels light and carries a big tradition. An orchestra, however important it is to the lifeblood of a community’s culture, brings with it thorny logistics and formidable budget challenges. Chamber music, conversely, has the benefit of leanness.

That theory has held sway in Ventura County, where one of the highlights of the musical calendar is the Ventura Chamber Music Festival in the spring while symphonic life makes its heroic struggle.

Last weekend, we got a hearty reminder of the compact power of chamber music from both an old reliable source and a fledgling new one.

The Camerata Pacifica’s second concert of its 11th season showed not only why the series is a tremendous boon to the local musical scene but is also why it is one of the finest chamber operations on the West Coast.

Meanwhile, something else is brewing over at Ventura City Hall, where pianist Newton Friedman and his wife, Vonice, have launched a series of chamber concerts. They are starting out slowly, with two concerts, but as the kickoff performance demonstrated the standards are high.

Saturday’s concert featured clarinetist Michele Zukovsky and cellist Howard Colf, whom we recognize from their positions with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Newton Friedman served as a solid partner on piano.

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The setting was ideal and just a touch surreal, as the beneficent friars looked down from the cornices on the atrium and the muted roar of the car races filtered over from the Ventura Fairgrounds. Somehow, this odd convergence of sacred and profane external details suited the concert’s basic agenda, toasting the late, great American composer Aaron Copland.

Zukovsky, who has performed under Copland’s conducting, played his Clarinet Concerto, a two-movement work commissioned by Benny Goodman in 1948. The jazz element is folded subtly into the second part, dubbed “Rather Fast,” but more as a flavoring than the meat, while the first section is the picture of tranquillity.

Fleshing out the performance, and dovetailing with Copland’s history, were the Three Pieces for Cello and Piano by Copland’s famed French mentor, Nadia Boulanger, and the Cello Sonata (transcribed from Clarinet Sonata) by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein was a friend of Copland’s and an ardent champion of his music--including Copland’s later “difficult” music. As heard in this piece, a mixture of serious writing and melodious “tune-smithing,” Bernstein was also undoubtedly influenced by Copland. They died in the same year, 1990, although Copland was 18 years Bernstein’s senior.

Baritone Roberto Gomez closed the performance with a bold, lucid reading of an old favorite, “Old American Songs.”

Copland has become synonymous with Americana, but his musical scope was vaster in ambition than that term can accommodate. He adapted these two sets of five songs in 1950 and 1952, respectively, including cherished tunes such as “Simple Gifts” and the whimsical “I Bought Me a Cat,” and added his own modern twists. The charm is in the setting, and Copland-ish inventions give a signature, 20th-century spin to “Golden Willow Tree” and especially the hymn “At the River.” On that, the tune is like a comfy chair, while the piano part takes some disarming turns, like questions interjected into a sermon.

Camerata Report: The Camerata Pacifica’s most recent program leaned back into agreeably romantic reverie, as heard last Friday in the choice, intimate confines of the Santa Barbara City College’s Fe Bland Theater (it also performed at Temple Beth Torah in Ventura and the Civic Arts Plaza’s Forum Theater).

On the menu were an intriguing rarity, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Phantasy” Quintet, ethereal and driving by turns, Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D Minor, and Schubert’s immortally moving String Quartet in D Minor, a.k.a. “Death and the Maiden.”

The opening Schubert was played with focused intensity by familiar Camerata members violist Donald MicInnes and cellist John Walz, along with two newcomers. We recognize second violinist Elizabeth Pitcairn as co-concertmaster for the New West Symphony’s last concert, dazzling us with her solo on “Scheherazade.” First violinist Brian Lewis is another fresh face, who played with enough fervency to break a string, always a strange reality check in classical music. The Mendelssohn, played with verve by pianist Joanne Pearce, shone as well, from the grand opening movement--a meal in itself--to the heated, genial interplay of its scherzo.

In short, it was a very ripe weekend for the chamber music cause in these parts.

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