MUSIC REVIEW : SOPRANO WHEELER IN RECITAL AT USC

An unhackneyed program and an honest, probing interpretive outlook made Kimball Wheeler’s Monday vocal recital at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC at least a qualified success, with reservations about her artistry arising only in matters of technique.

There can be little doubt Wheeler extended herself with a terrific (and terrifically challenging) list of songs including works in English (some Purcell airs), French (Debussy), Russian (Shostakovich’s very late “Six Songs to Poems of Marina Isvetayeva”), German (some early Schoenberg), Spanish (Falla’s “Siete Canciones Populares”) and even ancient Greek, courtesy of American composer John Hawley’s monochromatic “Sappho Songs,” which received their West Coast premiere Monday.

Nor did Wheeler approach these wildly divergent challenges with a homogenized and homogenizing interpretive stance. In each case, the singer (listed as a soprano but singing a mezzo’s songs) took pains clearly to enunciate the texts and point the phrases so that each song was a miniature voyage of discovery, with pleasant musical surprises all along the route.

Would that Wheeler had a truly seductive sound to go along with such sensitive interpretations. Unfortunately, the instrument is not a terribly subtle or flexible one; almost all firmness disappeared when the singer ventured below middle C, and the top, while certainly strong, took on an unpleasant metallic ring when forced from the chest, as Wheeler did in the Mussorgskian “Poet and Tsar” of the Shostakovich set.

Yet one came away from the recital understanding the composers represented therein a little better: the occasional minimalist tendencies of Debussy’s Mallarme settings, the Straussian excesses of the young Schoenberg, the reserve of tenderness in the dying Shostakovich’s late works. And on this count, at least, Wheeler is a first-rate communicator.

Pianist Joel Sachs contributed a musical thoughtfulness all his own as accompanist, although he occasionally overmatched his singing partner, especially in the Shostakovich works.