Music Reviews : Andre Watts Recital at El Camino College

A high profile earned partly by television appearances and a stage persona that takes pianism into the choreographic realm might account for Andre Watts’ huge following.

Certainly, one can’t explain it on the basis of Watts’ offering fresher, deeper or more compelling ideas about his chosen music than those offered by others, whose recitals are less well-attended.

And Sunday night--when he played Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Schubert at El Camino College (the same program will be given Sunday at Ambassador Auditorium)--there were all the familiar trappings.

The pianist laid out the scores with grand markings, the kind that call attention to virtuosity. He made clear to all the architecture at hand.

For those who needed a little more help he was ever the ready guide--with mile-a-minute, silent muttering, his mouth a compressor that chugged along at the same speed of fast scales; with head-shaking and raised eyebrows as emotive accompaniment to tender passages.

In fact, so much strenuous activity went into these maneuvers that one wondered if some of it might be better spent probing the music.

Both thundering vehemence and poetic repose emerged from Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy, for instance, but how much more haunted and bedeviled might we have known it to be?

To Watts’ credit, the Chopin B-flat-minor Sonata had no moony exaggeration and was all of a piece. Moreover, in Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli he indeed captured a plaintive 20th-Century sensibility.