DONALD McINNES: A NATIVE SON COMES HOME

Donald McInnes looks serious--but, watch out. Beneath a deadpan sobriety, the new professor of viola at USC--officially, McInnes now occupies the William Primrose chair at the school of music--harbors a biting wit, an on-target sense of mimicry and a mind bent in the direction of probing analysis.

Visit his master class--given Wednesday afternoons at 5 in Booth Hall on the university campus--and you can see these qualities in action. You can also see immediate and positive results in the playing of the students.

McInnes is too caring and sensible a teacher to deflate, demean or harangue his students, a select group of young violists who have come to USC from all around the United States and abroad to work under him. At the same time, he is too honest a musician to leave unfixed those mechanical details and approaches that may impede their path to self-reliant musicianship and artistry.

While praising achievements, McInnes also points out areas where changes or improvements must be made. He spots tendencies early in the game; he solves technical problems by dissecting them; he gives a number of different suggestions about the options the player has in specific musical passages.

And he finds the humor in the deadly serious matter of musical interpretation, as well as in the pragmatic business of operating a musical instrument. A long and successful career as soloist--McInnes’ discography shows recordings made with the New York Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France and the LaSalle Quartet, among others--has not robbed the violist of his sense of the absurd. Or a forgiving cynicism.

It wasn’t that long ago, one class-observer remembers, that McInnes worked under the same kind of demanding tutelage he now dispenses. As a teen-age violin student of Sascha Jacobsen at the Music Academy of the West in the 1950s, McInnes endured his share of Jacobsen’s exigent style of teaching, which included a certain friendly sarcasm.

At his new home in Alhambra, McInnes recalls those days with relish, and even affectionately mimics the late Jacobsen, as well as some still-living, string-playing colleagues. For many years on university faculties in Seattle, Cincinnati and Ann Arbor while he toured as soloist and chamber-music specialist, the 46-year-old violist has now come home to California.

A native of San Francisco, he grew up in Santa Barbara, where he was graduated from UC Santa Barbara before doing service at West Point and, after that, completing his viola studies under Primrose at USC.

“It’s a wonderful situation, and I’m glad to be back in California,” McInnes says. He points out that USC is providing funds for viola scholarships for a number of aspiring soloists who want to work under him, that the class is not too large and that the whole direction of USC music, with the advent of Larry Livingston, the incoming dean of the school of music, seems upward and promising.

At the same time, McInnes intends, he says, to continue to perform when he chooses. “I’m not as busy as some pianists,” he discloses, “but I can handle between 30 and 40 engagements a year. At this point in my career, I’m not anxious to travel. “

What happens this week is that McInnes plays his first formal recital as a member of the USC faculty, Monday night at 8.