RUSSIAN-TRAINED PIANIST : BORIS BERMAN IN 20TH-CENTURY WORKS

Until he played a program of 20th-Century piano music at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC on Wednesday night, not many people hereabouts were aware of Boris Berman--not to be confused with the older and more famous Lazar Berman.

Both are Russian-born and trained. Lazar Berman has maintained a base in the Soviet Union. After numerous wanderings, Boris Berman is currently chairman of the piano department of the school of music at Yale.

Although seemingly diametrically opposed in their musical preferences, both pianists share the unmistakable stamp of the great Russian tradition of breathless virtuosity and absolute security. In musical quality they are on a par.

Boris Berman’s program was not primarily aimed at pianistic display, but by the end of the evening he had proved himself capable of generating electrical excitement.

He opened with the Five Pieces of Schoenberg’s Opus 23, and it was instantly apparent that he was seeing behind the notes as few others have. In color, mood and phrasing he sounded the composer’s subtle intensities as surely as if he were playing Chopin.

The innate virtuosity began to flash in Berio’s long and repetitious “Sequenza IV,” one of those things that attracts at first and bores by the end. Lukas Foss’ 1981 “Solo,” his first piano piece since 1953, is in much the same category--ingenious, clever, modish, but finally tiresome.

After this relentless modernity, two of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues, from Opus 87, seemed nothing less than heavenly in their orderly way, evoking reposeful tone and contrapuntal dexterity.

It remained for Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7 to reach an orgiastic climax, pure Prokofiev in its sardonic humor, its tender lyricism and the frenetic abandon of the final Toccata. On any terms, this was major piano playing.