MUSIC REVIEW : Andre Watts: Freshly Touching an Emotional Chord

In Ambassador Auditorium on Tuesday, Andre Watts played a vast amount of music, offering virtuosity aplenty within the context of deeply considered yet never studied-sounding interpretations.

Watts loves color and emotion. And he can find both in unlikely places, such as in the three sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti with which the evening began, or Mozart’s Rondo in A, K. 511 (no Brendel-like severity of tone or manner here) and Janacek’s pensively ominous Sonata, a welcome late addition to the program.

Watts can, and did, overstep the bounds of stylistic reason with a fiercely driven, overpedaled (result: sonic muddle) opening movement in the Beethoven Sonata in D from Opus 10. Then he more than compensated with as moving a reading of its grieving slow movement and as witty and rhythmically subtle a dash through its capricious finale as one is likely to encounter in a lifetime of concert-going.

Elsewhere, within a well-contrasted Chopin group (Watts’ programs look like grab bags on paper but inevitably make structural sense in the hearing), one could point to an affectingly dark and limpid C-sharp minor Etude followed by an exquisitely colorful, billowy “Aeolian Harp”: super-familiar music that in Watts’ hands beguiles with improvisatory freshness.

Thoughtful programming likewise marked the pairing of a couple of clever, quirkily Lisztian miniatures of Luciano Berio and Liszt’s own futuristic “Nuages gris,” the stylistic lines between the two fascinatingly blurred, and then as a built-in encore to the group, the sweet simplicity of Liszt’s “En Reve.”

And to hear the Janacek Sonata played not as an exercise in sulky, percussive modernism but as a late-Romantic elegy, using the full resources of the modern grand piano (an American Steinway on this occasion), constituted a display not only of mastery in the mechanical sense, but also an affirmation of Watts as the most valuable kind of entertainer, readily able to make--and score--points with music of intellectual rigorousness or with charming trifles.