At 53, Andre Watts has reached the point in his career where he can focus on the core classics of piano literature and still command the loyalty of a public that fondly remembers him from the early 1960s, when his splashy performance of a Liszt concerto under Leonard Bernstein made him an instant celebrity on national television.
Accordingly, he crafted his recital Sunday at Symphony Center around sonatas by Haydn, Beethoven and Chopin. Even the shorter works in between were miniature masterpieces consistent with the program’s prevailing sober tone.
His concert reached its apogee with a powerful, exhilarating account of the Beethoven “Appassionata” Sonata, Opus 57. He preceded it with two major Classical pieces that undoubtedly had exerted a profound effect on the young Beethoven–Haydn’s Sonata in C (Hob.XVI:48) and Mozart’s Rondo in A minor, K.511.
Both the Haydn and Mozart works displayed the pianist’s credentials as a Classical interpreter. He articulated long phrases in the sonata with crystalline clarity, dispatching the variations cleanly but never glibly. The music was set forth as Haydn intended–on the widest possible dynamic scale–from thunderous bass notes to bell-like tones several octaves higher.
The Mozart rondo emerged as a model of finely judged balance and proportion. Watts honored the score’s pristine simplicity by refusing to romanticize it.
The “Appassionata” is Beethoven on his way to the Fifth Symphony, a concentrated torrent of pure musical energy. Sooner or later all pianists test their mettle against the furious splendors of this great sonata, and its formidable demands have defeated quite a few.
Watts met them with full force of mind and body, reveling in the restless, explosive nature of Beethoven’s piano writing. Watts’ technical control was such that musical detail projected clearly within a firm overarching structure. The sense of perpetual striving to overcome obstacles that is so characteristic of Beethoven came across palpably.
Watts flung himself into the sonata with a coiled-spring attack and rhythmic drive that worked as much on the nerve endings as the notes. Few pianists are better equipped to bring off such an impetuous, risk-taking view of this masterpiece: The coda all but disappeared in a blur of flying fingers.
Watts’ all-Chopin group fell short of the first-half interpretation, despite flashes of insightful pianism.
Chopin’s moody Nocturne in C-sharp minor made a welcome prelude to that composer’s Sonata in B-flat minor, Opus 35. The pianist was more firebrand than poet in the sonata. Where he risked a precipitous tempo, in both the Scherzo and finale, there were too many wrong notes and passages that sounded hectic and unsettled. He took the “Funeral March” at more an andante than a lento, to the music’s advantage, building this grim dirge with implacable forward motion.
The only real showpiece Watts allowed himself was the first encore, a whirlwind bagatelle by Alexander Tcherepnin, the Chicago-based Russian composer who died in 1977. Schubert’s “Klavierstueck No. 1,” an allegro that is also a favorite encore of Alfred Brendel’s, ended the program.
– The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has launched “Theodore,” the online catalog of holdings in the CSO’s Samuel R. and Marie Louise Rosenthal Archives. The catalog, available to the public for the first time via the CSO’s Web site (www.cso.org) lists more than 15,000 items, including recordings, radio broadcasts, moving images, photographs, oral histories and corporate records.
Several large music collections are represented, including nearly 100 scores marked by Fritz Reiner and 130 original compositions and arrangements by Frederick Stock. Original materials may be accessed in the archives’ reading room at Symphony Center, open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. by appointment.
The online catalog is named after Theodore Thomas, the CSO’s founder and first music director.
