Earl Wild on the Keys to American Pianism : Music: The 75-year-old pianist, who plays a Chopin program tonight at Hollywood Bowl, says personality and sound are the vital ingredients.

From all the sense of discovery in the wide attention Earl Wild got last year on his tours, which climaxed with a Carnegie Hall recital on his birthday, you might imagine the pianist was yet another debutant wonder. But that birthday was his 75th, and Wild now finds himself the somewhat bemused grand old man of the American piano.

“I’m too old to get very excited about that,” he says dryly. “I’m no different now than I was.”

What he was--and remains, by all accounts--is a bona fide Romantic virtuoso. With the passing in recent seasons of Horowitz, Arrau, Bolet and Rudolf Serkin, that is a dwindling breed, and Wild is not sanguine about the future.

“Young pianists today are very competition-minded,” he says by telephone from his home in Columbus, Ohio. “They try to play very fast and very loud. The competitions destroy the personal element, which is what the public really likes. They’re all alike. . . . I know that was one of the problems at Juilliard, where I taught for 11 years.”

Wild continues the struggle, now as artist-in-residence at Ohio State University. “I like it here very much,” he says. “I have about seven pupils, and they’re all talented.”

And what does he impart to these students?

“First of all, one has to be secure technically. But the most important thing is the tone, because that can really move the audience which doesn’t know if the technical details are right. There are all kinds of tone. The only way to really learn how to do it, is to do it.”

Which is exactly what Wild continues to do. He plays a Chopin program tonight at Hollywood Bowl, and tone is among the chief preoccupations during his preparations.

“I look at all the editions--for Chopin, I’ve always loved the Mikuli edition. I always reread all the editorial notes, but in the final analysis, you play what sounds best. It’s really in the sound--that’s what’s important. Too many people get lost in the details.”

Given this obsession, it is not surprising to find him deeply concerned with the much-bruited decline in pianos, particularly Steinways.

“Years ago I played Steinways,” Wild says. “I remember once I played with the Baltimore Symphony, and the piano couldn’t be heard. I complained bitterly about the instrument, and was told that Rubinstein had played that piano. Later, one of the technicians told me, ‘Yes, Rubinstein did play that piano--and you could hear the screaming about it across town!’

“I went to Baldwin, and they’ve taken very good care of me. They’re very responsive.”

“Steinway artists have suffered so. Times are changing. I just hope all pianos get better.”

Wild records two new discs a year, and has just released a Chopin disc which includes some of the music he will be playing tonight. Long familiarity, however, has not dimmed his enthusiasm for the repertory.

“The Ballades I played when I was about 15, but as you grow older, they keep changing. The balancing keeps changing.”

His second disc this year is a just-finished Rachmaninoff program, which should come out next month. “I love to record,” Wild says, “I’ve been doing it for so long. My first was made for RCA in 1939, with the oboe player from Toscanini’s orchestra.”

The discography he has generated lists more than 31 concertos and 300 solo works, and not all in the Romantic tradition. He recorded the Copland Concerto with the composer, and made the first complete recording of “Rhapsody in Blue.”

It was the Gershwin classic, in fact, that brought him his first celebrity. He was working as a staff pianist at NBC when Toscanini asked him to play “Rhapsody in Blue.” “I learned it that week, and it immediately made me a Gershwin expert,” Wild muses. “My career has been very strange.”

That it has. During World War II he served in the U.S. Navy Band as a flutist, played piano concertos with the Navy Symphony, and traveled with Eleanor Roosevelt, playing the national anthem before the First Lady’s speeches. In the ‘50s, he wrote some of Sid Caesar’s musical parodies for NBC and his own compositions include the Easter oratorio “Revelations”--broadcast on ABC in ’62 and ‘64, with Wild conducting--as well as many piano transcriptions.

From Los Angeles, Wild travels on to Telluride, Colo., for rest and work on a new set of variations for piano and orchestra.

“I haven’t written anything for a long time,” Wild says. “Writing helps me very much, because it sort of revives my interest in everything else.”