Music : Pianist Andre Watts’ Subtle Performance Unappreciated : Recital: The virtuoso gave a sophisticated recital for an audience that apparently only wanted to hear keyboard thunder.

Persuading audiences to listen to the music at a piano recital--as opposed to merely watching the pyrotechnics--is no mean feat. In his Saturday night recital for the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, Andre Watts gave it his best shot, but the stolid Civic Theatre audience did not prove amenable to his efforts.

Watts cleverly opened the program with Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor, K. 511, a hypnotic miniature whose delicate refrain hushed the house. He deftly traced its sinuous lines, underplayed the gradual profusion of ornamentation, and then allowed the work to vanish into the ether. The performer kept his listeners’ rapt attention through Beethoven’s infrequently played 32 Variations in C Minor, an early (1806) variation cycle on the composer’s own theme. Evidently delighting in its curious turns and unexpected outbursts, Watts worked his magic over this orphaned scrap of Beethoven.

But, by the time Watts arrived at his finale, Liszt’s evergreen Sonata in B Minor, the audience had devolved into a tubercular ward of incessant coughers and inattentive program rattlers. It was, of course, their loss. Watts’ masterful Liszt Sonata fused Romantic passion and cool logic, binding its fragmentary effusions into a seamless gesture. He savored the delectable lyricism of the Andante sostenuto without losing the work’s inexorable momentum.

Watts dispensed the panache of Chopin’s Ballade in F Major with uncanny ease. Schubert’s “Drei Klavierstucke” (D 946) suited the performer’s introspective bent. Although these pieces indiscriminately jostled the sublime with the banal, Watts made every transition appear elegant. He reveled in the Allegro’s carnival humor and exploited the rhythmic complexities of the Allegretto’s dense repeated chords, making the unorthodox piece sound unexpectedly modern.

In short, Watts brought a sophisticated program to an audience that merely wanted an evening of glitzy brand-name exposure. Perhaps for San Diego he needs to program the equivalent of Luciano Pavarotti’s Neapolitan love songs.