USC Symphony Plays to Win : Orchestra: The director of the respected college group draws from the School of Music but loses some of its team to the pros.

If there were a Rose Bowl for orchestras, the USC Symphony would no doubt be invited even more frequently than the mighty Trojans play in Pasadena. Among collegiate orchestras, it’s the cream of the crop, carrying as much credibility among knowledgeable audiences as many professional orchestras.

While most university orchestras go begging for players, padding their ranks with faculty musicians and volunteers from the community, music director Daniel Lewis has the luxury of drawing his 70-member ensemble from the university’s School of Music, where 750 music majors are enrolled. So “every musician,” Lewis says, “has to reach a professional level before getting into the orchestra.”

His challenge is not filling the ranks but keeping his musicians.

“I’m constantly losing my best players to professional orchestras,” he lamented over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “One of my cellists just left to join the Los Angeles Philharmonic.”

Lewis will conduct the USC Symphony, the USC Chamber Singers and the USC Concert Choir tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in a concert sponsored jointly by the Orange County Philharmonic Society and the USC School of Music. His last triumph on the road was in November, 1991, when, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the orchestra gave the East Coast premiere of Karel Husa’s Cello Concerto, with Lynn Harrel as soloist.

For tonight, the orchestra’s Orange County debut, Lewis has selected a program featuring pianist Daniel Pollack of USC in the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, USC resident composer Morten Lauridsen’s “Mid-Winter Songs on Poems by Robert Graves” and Benjamin Britten’s “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell.”

Lewis is partial to Lauridsen’s works; he describes his colleague as one of the finest contemporary composers for the voice. “The ‘Mid-Winter Songs’ are wonderfully introspective and poignant,” he added.

“Winter is a rich theme to mine,” said Lauridsen, a native of the Pacific Northwest. “It brings up the issues of purity, life, death and contradictions. This is the second cycle of songs I have set on winter themes.”

Lewis has been a fixture at USC since 1970, conducting the orchestra and supervising the music school’s program of conducting studies. At 67, he has thought about retirement but, he said, not long enough to take it seriously.

“The only advantage for me,” he said, “would be the freedom to accept more invitations to guest conduct elsewhere.”

His reluctance to leave USC reflects his strong Southern California roots. He grew up in San Diego, where he became an accomplished violinist. He was concertmaster of the San Diego Symphony in the 1950s when Robert Shaw, the orchestra’s music director, made him his associate conductor, launching his conducting career. Lewis eventually went off to Europe to refine his podium technique and returned to the Southland to teach at Cal State Fullerton and to direct the Orange County Symphony for four seasons (1967-71).

“It was a good orchestra,” he recalled. “Our main problem was that we never had a good hall in which to play. I enjoyed the serious attitudes of the musicians. In fact, I took some of them with me when I went to the Pasadena Symphony (as music director) in 1971.”

The Orange County Philharmonic Society presents the USC Symphony, Chamber Singers and Concert Choir performing Britten’s “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell,” Morten Lauridsen’s “Mid-Winter Songs on Poems by Robert Graves” and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 in B-flat minor tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain: 8 p.m. $5 to $25. (714) 553-2422.