STEIN, BOWER AT USC INSTITUTE

There’s much to be said for a man who not only knows his subject, but loves it and lives it. Leonard Stein came out talking Wednesday evening and quickly created a friends-around-the-piano feeling at the Schoenberg Institute, USC.

Stein is director of the institute, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this season. He was also one of Schoenberg’s pupils and brings rare authority as well as rambling geniality to his discussions of matters Schoenbergian.

To the keyboard he brings a sturdy, serviceable technique and a monochromatic palette. The blunt personality of the resident Yamaha did not enhance Stein’s efforts toward expressive nuance.

The contributions of mezzo-soprano Jacalyn Bower, however, weighed the musical balance heavily in favor of controlled fantasy. Schoenberg’s “Das Buch der haengenden Gaerten” demands emotional commitment as well as an aloof, probing intellect, and Bower delivered both.

Bower scaled her big, flexible voice to the measure of the room and Stein’s urgent accompaniments. She can go from warm opulence to chill granite in mid-passage and does so in service of textual point.

If Stein could not match her variety, he could stay very close in terms of phrasing and dynamics. Their reading lacked little in musical or poetic momentum.

Stein began cold in Berg’s Opus 1 Sonata, needing to restart after some lapses and never quite clarifying its chunky textures and rhapsodic rushes. But he ended with an appropriately explosive whiz in the last of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11.

In between came Busoni’s “concert interpretation” of the second Opus 11 piece, and Wolfgang Fraenkel’s “Variations and Fantasies” (1954) on a theme by Schoenberg, which proved a pertinent, highly individual homage, charged with a real measure of pianist bravura.