André Watts took both Liszt and Schubert to his heart
One of America’s first black stars of classical piano died on July 12th, aged 77
The concert piece, Franz Liszt’s E-flat Concerto, opened with a bracing call and response: a seven-note motif from the strings, answered by a rousing clarion from the horns and woodwinds. Then the same again, the strings pitched a bit lower and the winds higher: a call to action. The pianist took it up. The orchestra responded, and a chase began: for the next 20 minutes the pianist played sweeping flights that sounded like improvisations, using almost the entire keyboard. The orchestra doing the chasing on January 12th 1963 was the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, then perhaps the most celebrated conductor in the world. The pianist was André Watts. Blade-thin and straight-backed, he played with burning-eyed fluency, every inch the Romantic hero. He was 16.
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline “The last Romantic”
From the July 29th 2023 edition
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