André Watts to Play Grieg Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Several Performances

By Catherine J. Barrier

At age 9, the Philadelphia-trained, now world-famous pianist André Watts won the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Student Competition playing a piano concerto by Joseph Haydn.  Having performed with the Orchestra many times since then, Watts returns tonight and next week for three performances of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, the concerto Grieg wrote as homage to his native land of Norway.

André Watts, one of the world’s most celebrated pianists, renowned in particular for his interpretations of musical works of the Romantic Period, was born in Nuremberg, Germany on June 20, 1946.  At age 4, he began to study the violin.  By the time he was 6, his Hungarian mother, a pianist herself, started to teach him to play the piano.  When Watts was 8, his African-American father, a U.S. Army non-commissioned officer, was assigned to duty back in the States, and the family came to Philadelphia.

Watts studied at the Philadelphia Musical Academy (today the University of the Arts) and graduated in 1963, the year in which his career was launched nationally.  On January 1 of that year, Leonard Bernstein, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, asked Watts to fill in for Glenn Gould, the scheduled soloist for the regular subscription concert that day who had become ill.  Watts performed Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat, which Bernstein had first heard him play a month earlier during a videotaped Young People’s Concert with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.  At the end of Watts’s New Year’s Day performance, the whole orchestra, as well as the audience, gave the young pianist a standing ovation.  About two weeks later, his videotaped December 1962 performance of Liszt’s E-flat concerto was televised nationally on CBS, with Leonard Bernstein introducing Watts to the national television audience and praising him highly.  André Watts’s musical career was firmly underway.

Watts then studied at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Maryland and began doing concerts throughout the United States.  He made his European debut with the London Symphony Orchestra in June 1966 and began recording on Columbia Masterworks Records at age twenty-one.  By 1969, his concert schedule was booked three years in advance, and by the mid 1970’s, Watts was giving 150 concerts, recitals, and chamber performances a year.

 
These days, André Watts divides his time between performing and teaching.  Previously, the Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland, Watts joined the faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, as the Jack I. and Dora B. Hamlin Endowed Chair in Music, in 2004. 

Andre Watts

“For me, [André Watts] is not only the André Watts that some people know—the famous one,” said Evelyne Brancart, the Chair of the Jacobs School’s piano department.  “He’s a very special person—outside of the big name that he is.  I have known many artists who are well known, and not all of them are nice people, but André, . . . there’s something good about him.  I feel he’s one of us.  I like him.  He’s a wonderful colleague, and I think all my colleagues feel the same way.”

“One of the first things I noticed about [André Watts] is his generosity—all the time, energy, and intensity he gives when he teaches—and all the experience he draws from,” said Luke Norell, a doctrinal piano student who studies with Watts at the Jacobs School of Music.  Norell is one of only 5 private students, 4 graduate students and 1 advanced undergraduate student, whom Watts teaches at the school.

“The students study only with him, and he’s [solely] responsible for their development,” said Brancart. 

In fact, Watts’s teaching duties at the School are limited to his teaching these 5 students—privately and in Master classes.  “He has fewer students than some of the [12 other] faculty members, and he’s not here as often due to his other work, but . . . he’s something very special.  And he’s quite attached to his students,” said Brancart.

Luke Norell heard André Watts perform Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor a few years ago.  “It was a very exciting performance,” said Norell.  “Often the concerti end with dance movements, and I just remember him really capturing the excitement, . . . catching the excitement and vitality of the dance.  It was one of my favorite performances of this well-known piece.”

Some of that excitement may have been due to the inspiration of Liszt’s life and music on Watts as a young piano student.  It has been noted by at least one observer that Watts has apparently adopted Liszt’s theatrical playing style.



Pianist Andre Watts Performing

André Watts will perform Edvard Grieg’s Concerto in A Minor with the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its Chief Conductor, Maestro Charles Dutoit, this evening, September 30, Saturday evening, October 2, and Tuesday evening, October 5, each night at 8:00 p.m., on the Verizon Hall stage at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, located at the southwest corner of Broad and Spruce Streets, three blocks south of City Hall, on the Avenue of the Arts, in Philadelphia.  Coupled with his solo performance with the Orchestra will be the Orchestra’s interpretation of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, the composer’s longest and orchestrally largest symphony to date.  For tickets, call (215) 893-1999.  For more information, including information about parking near the Kimmel Center, see www.philorch.org, or call (215) 790-5800.
 

Maestro Charles Dutoit Conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra

The music of the Romantic Period was written not so much for the aristocracy but for public concerts and festivals for the people.  In general, the music is characterized by more intense personal expression of emotion, and there are adventurous modulations—to “less-expected” keys, chromatic harmonies, dissonances and their resolutions, and bold dramatic contrasts, all of which demanded greater technical virtuosity of pianists, violinists, flautists.  The Romantic orchestra was expanded—sometimes made much larger; some of the instruments were improved during that time and made able to project their sounds and tonal colors further; there was an increase in the types of musical pieces; and shape and unity in longer works were achieved through the use of recurring themes—just to mention a few things.  In the end, the individual style of a Romantic composer—or artist—became more apparent.

One thing that Watts, Liszt, Grieg, and Shostakovich all have in common is that they all made their mark on the musical world well before they were thirty.  Watts was featured playing the piano on national television at 16; Liszt, an early Romantic composer, produced works of lasting value early in his career; Grieg composed his Piano Concerto in A Minor at 25; and Shostakovich became internationally known with his First Symphony at the age of 19.

Liszt’s virtuoso piano concerts, or “recitals” as he called them, became quite popular in the 1800’s.  He employed thematic transformations in his music, and because of improvements in transportation at the time, he was one of the musicians for whom touring internationally became more accessible.  He thus played to audiences in many countries.


Romantic Composer Edvard Grieg

 Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway on June 15, 1842.  He is known as a national composer—as Norway’s greatest composer—and described his own music as “Norwegian Peasant Dances”.  Of original Scottish ancestry, on his father’s side, Grieg was raised in a musical home.  Like Watts after him, Grieg received his first piano lessons from his mother, starting when he was only 6 years old.  Later, he attended the Leipzig Conservatory—to study piano—and was there influenced by the Romantic composers Mendelssohn and Schumann.  He graduated in 1862.  In the winter of 1864-65, Grieg founded the Copenhagen concert society Euterpe, in order to produce the works of young Norwegian composers.  In 1868, newly married, Grieg vacationed in Denmark, and while there, he wrote his now-famous Piano Concerto in A Minor.  It was the first full expression of his then new sense of national pride and was first performed by Edmund Neupert on April 3, 1869, in the Casino Theater, in Copenhagen.  (It was published in 1872.)  In 1870, Grieg met Liszt in Rome, and the latter gave Grieg some advice on orchestration for the piece, namely to give the melody of the second theme in the first movement to a solo trumpet.

Grieg was later asked by Henrik Ibsen to compose the (incidental) music for the author’s Peer Gynt (circa 1874-76).  The use of literary inspiration in the music of the Romantic Period was quite common—especially in the early part of the period.  Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Danté Symphony and Années de Pélerinage, as well as Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, are examples of this.  Much of Grieg’s music from Peer Gynt has become extremely popular over the years.



Troldhaugen-Grieg's Home in Bergen

Grieg became the Music Director of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra (Harmonien) in the early 1880’s, and in the early 1900’s, he recorded some of his piano music, demonstrating his skill as a pianist.  His famous Concerto in A Minor was first performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra in April 1901, just a year after the Orchestra’s formation, with Teresa Carreno as the pianist and with Fritz Scheel, the Orchestra’s first conductor (1900-07), conducting.  Grieg died of heart failure in his hometown of Bergen on September 4, 1907.

Grieg’s A minor concerto is scored for piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.

Dmitri Shostakovich in 1935

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on September 25, 1906.  After the success of his graduation project from Leningrad Conservatory, his First Symphony (premiered in America by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1928), his fame rose steadily for almost a decade, but just before his Fourth Symphony (composed from 1935 to 1936) was to be premiered in Leningrad, Joseph Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich’s popular and acclaimed opera Lady Macbeth (completed in 1932) and ended up walking out.  A subsequent bad review in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Russian Communist Party, made it clear to the composer that he needed to be careful.

The horrors of the Stalinist era were being manifested in Russian society, and some of Shostakovich’s associates, friends, and family members ended up disappearing or dying under mysterious circumstances.  Some time after the Pravda review, Shostakovich issued a press release withdrawing his Fourth Symphony from its scheduled upcoming premier.  The real reason(s) for his doing this are still not entirely clear.

In the end, Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony was not premiered until 1961—by the Moscow Philharmonic, being led by Kirill Kondrashin.  Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered the work in America in 1963.

Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony is a work in three movements, two long outer ones sandwiching a short, central one.  The first movement is bold and intense and uses fugal and ostinato techniques.  The short, second Moderato con moto is a type of intermezzo.  The final movement starts slowly and leads to a faster section, full of dances and marches.  It concludes with a gradual building of haunting, tragic dissonance.

Today, André Watts remains a celebrated and beloved pianist.  He continually gives sold-out recitals and performs with the great orchestras throughout the world.  He’s a regular at the major summer music festivals as well: the Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart, the Mann Music Center, Ravinia, Saratoga, and Tanglewood.

“I’ve been studying with Mr. Watts for two years, going on three,” said Luke Norell.  “It’s been a huge asset to my playing, the expertise he offers.  It’s wonderful to work on concerti he’s performed so many times.”

“He really has an incredible musical perception, an acute ear,” said Norell.  “I’ve seen the effects of that.  He knows how to pinpoint the changes that I need to be making.  He’s an excellent teacher in that respect—in being able to identify the problems and [in helping me to] fix them.”

“He’s remade my [keyboard] technique, even at the graduate level—translating my physical motions into desired sounds,” said Norell.  “His identifying what I’m doing physically and whether that’s the right physical gesture for the desired sound—and his explaining how to improve that . . . he helps me personally a lot in that respect.  One of these physical movements, or gestures, is “…readjusting the closeness to the keys [while playing], getting away from the vertical attack on the keys and moving in a horizontal way, toward the keys.  This produces a different sound, more of a singer’s melody.”

“In some ways, [André Watts] is a very private person,” said Evelyne Brancart.  “In many ways, he’s modest, but at the same time, he knows when he goes out [on stage] what he’s going to take there.”

And if Luke Norell’s experience of André Watts’s playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor several years ago is duplicated in each of the upcoming concerts, André Watts will certainly bring vitality to the stage—and give a “very exciting performance” each night.  Be sure to catch one of these fine performances!

*   Photos of Andre Watts Courtesy of Indiana University
** Photo of Maestro Dutoit Conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra Courtesy of the Philadelphia Orchestra

© 2010 by Catherine J. Barrier.  All rights reserved.