MUSIC REVIEW : Benefit Recital by Donald McInnes at USC

In a recital to benefit the Koldofsky Memorial Scholarship Fund at USC, violist Donald McInnes introduced a serious and major work: Robert Suderberg’s “Solo Music II: Ritual Cycle of Lyrics and Dances” for unaccompanied viola.

Although the work was composed in 1988, this performance, Monday night, was billed as a world premiere--although, according to an insert in the information-poor program book, a preview of the piece had been given in 1989 at Williams College, Mass., where Suderberg is composer-in-residence. The composer sat in the Hancock Auditorium audience.

Lasting 23 minutes, the five-part work does not shy away from making big, expressive and rhetorical gestures. It requires formidable technique and rich, strong tone, yet also a sense of inwardness, alertness to folk and national borrowings and even a willingness to indulge in impish wit. McInnes provided all of these handsomely.

Receiving a first Los Angeles performance, William O. Smith’s “Psyche,” for viola and women’s voices (composed in 1987) proved an attractive work.

While the women in the audience hummed a middle C for the duration (approximately five minutes), the violist deftly explored small excursions away from the tone, first close by, then in various octaves, before addressing explosively plucked and strummed chords, multiple-string slides, flashy arpeggios and eerie glassy harmonics.

Elsewhere, pianist Alan Smith provided accompaniment. Fluent in transcriptions of five songs by Faure--in which McInnes made an almost persuasive case for a viola substituting for a voice--Smith came to life and suggested that he might have a musical personality or ideas of his own only in a series of four Serenades (linked by their titles, certainly not their moods) by Schubert, Brahms, Wolf and Richard Strauss.

Earlier, Smith had provided proficient but characterless support. Certainly he failed to match McInnes’ warm phrasing and spectral rhythms in Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata (1919), an Impressionistic work with muscle.

The two opened the recital with a considerate but not affectionate reading of a transcription of Mozart’s Sonatina in E-flat, K. 439b, No. 2.