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BY JAMES McQUILLEN The Oregon Symphony with André Watts Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 1037 SW Broadway, 228-1353 7:30 pm Thursday, Sept. 17 $19-$60, patron tickets $350-$450. For patron ticket information, call 228-4294. The Oregon Symphony has worked hard on casting itself as an orchestra for the people, and in its season-opening gala, the program's focus is on the folk. Under the baton of music director James DePreist, the 102-year-old symphony will present Dvorák's Symphony No. 8 and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, two works that draw from folk melodies and draw in large audiences with their tuneful popularity. The pieces themselves aren't the only draw, however; the featured soloist is André Watts, a gifted pianist and local favorite who is one of the most popular classical musicians of his generation. Watts has been performing since childhood--he soloed with the Philadelphia Orchestra at age 10--and his career was in some ways destined to enjoy wide appeal. When he was 16, Leonard Bernstein selected him to make his New York Philharmonic debut in one of the famous Young People's Concerts broadcast nationally on CBS. Two weeks later, he replaced Glenn Gould, who had abruptly canceled his subscription appearances, in performances of Liszt's E-flat Concerto. His appeal has not dimmed since that meteoric rise. Television has played a large part in Watts' career, and Watts has played a large part in music programming on television. In 1976 he was featured in a Sunday afternoon Live from Lincoln Center telecast that was the first full-length piano recital ever on television; he followed it in 1985 with the first full-length recital nationally telecast during prime time. He remains a prominent public television personality and off-screen is dedicated to playing before audiences rather than, like Gould, holing himself up in the studio. "Studio recording," he admits frankly, "is not something I particularly like." Not that live performance is without its pitfalls; like every performing artist, Watts has to cope with the erosion of respectful silence in the concert hall. Even the famously quiet Japanese, he notes (having just returned from concert engagements in Japan), have caught up with the rest of the world when it comes to making noise, particularly with cell phones and other irritating electronic accessories. "It used to be that a dropped program was a major catastrophe," he remembers. "Not anymore." And everywhere, he says wryly, "During flu season the concert hall sounds like a tubercular ward." Unlike some musicians who have been known to excoriate noisy concertgoers from the stage, he has a sense of humor about such interference. "I view it slightly as a personal failure if I'm bothered by it," he says. "When your awareness of the audience goes beyond a certain level, you're in trouble; you're focusing that much less on the music." Watts is a particularly focused musician whose interpretations are as notable for the penetrating thought behind them as for the technical virtuosity that brings them out, making them flow so exquisitely that some critics have said he turns the piano from a percussion instrument to a vocal one. "I'm very foursquare about the Beethoven sonatas," he says, to give one example of his attention to detail. "I'm anal about the dynamics, accents and rests on the page." Hearing this attention in his playing, some listeners remark on how new it makes the pieces sound. This freshness and frankness is a hallmark of his approach, whether to Scarlatti and Bach or to the Romantic monuments, such as concertos of Rachmaninov and Liszt, for which he is arguably most famous. It helps to explain why, in a field that depends for its survival on performers who can reliably make the old sound new again, audiences can't resist him.
originally published September 16, 1998
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