There was a time when André Watts eliminated Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto from his repertoire.
For a dozen years in the middle of his five-decade-plus career, he refused to play the piece.
“I love the piece. It’s a great piece, awfully well written,” Watts, 69, said. “Also something that we forget, what a clever, brilliant orchestrator (Rachmaninoff) was.”
But then there was that moment, the one that led the famous American pianist to take a break from the Rach 2.
“I was playing it once somewhere, I don’t even remember where, and I guess the performance was OK,” he recalled. “But I got to the last movement and I had finished the second rendition of the famous tune and I thought, ‘You know, gee, I hope that was OK because obviously I wasn’t in it.’”
He finished the concert then called his manager and said he wanted to take a break from the piece.
“I thought I won’t play it for a year, and it just dragged on and on and on. By the time I got around to playing it again it was 12 years later,” he said.
The Rach 2 returned to his playlist about 15 years ago and will be the centerpiece of his debut Saturday, Feb. 27, with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra.
Watts likes to consider concertos as “gigantic symphonies with gigantic piano parts.”
“They are not display pieces,” he said. “There is an awful lot of chamber music in this concerto. It’s easy to forget that and it’s something that I enjoy and like to do with this concerto.”
Watts said he often finds himself sitting at the piano listening to the orchestra play and for a brief moment he feels more like a member than a soloist.
“Basically concertos are large, large chamber music forms,” he said. “And I think that’s exactly the problem. They don’t fit so readily into the mold and they can so readily escape that and be played in a superficial way. … It’s too easy to forget how much of a symphony it is.”
Watts’ appearance here Saturday is his first since he joined Chamber Music Plus and actor Michael York in 2011 for “Lisztian Loves,” a musical monologue written by Chamber Music Plus’s cellist Harry Clark. Watts, Clark and Clark’s wife/Chamber Music Plus partner Sanda Schuldmann have been friends for nearly 50 years.
