Pianist Completes an Octave

Irrepressible even on the tele phone, Earl Wild is speaking from Telluride, Colo., 9,500 feet above sea level--in an aerie borrowed from a friend.

“Oh, yes, it’s very beautiful here,” says the veteran American pianist, who will turn 80 on Nov. 26. “The trees, the forest--we’re miles away from other people, and at night I hear all kinds of animals outside the house. It’s very relaxing.

“But, you know, every time I come up here, and as nice as it is, I think how much I miss the busy streets of a city. I really love that cement.”

It’s just that sort of longing to be where the action is that seems to drive the overachiever in Wild, who returns to the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday night for a birthday celebration recital, his second recital and 13th engagement there.

Overachievement has always been Wild’s modus operandi. The Pittsburgh native took himself off to New York in the 1930s and made a name for himself as something of a Gershwin specialist and played in symphonic and commercial orchestras under such conductors as Otto Klemperer, Arturo Toscanini and Frank Black.

Later, he escaped the Gershwin typecasting and performed a broad repertory of Romantic composers, especially the works of Franz Liszt. And in the end, his versatility is evident in a discography that runs to 27 pages, consisting of music from Albeniz to Weber and including numerous transcriptions by Franz Liszt and Earl Wild himself (a composer as well as a conductor, in his off hours).

As if to prove the breadth of his pianistic accomplishment and ambition, Wild mentions one of his latest CDs, Beethoven’s finger-bending and intellectually challenging “Hammerklavier” Sonata, released less than a year ago:

“Over the years, I had heard everybody play it--live and on recordings. And, of course, I taught it, but had never played it.

“So when I came to study the many editions, I saw all the ways there are to approach the sonata. After considering many possibilities, I found the best edition is the one by the much-maligned Hans von Bulow. That is my favorite.”

A little Beethoven, the quirky E-flat Sonata of Opus 31, will surface in the white-haired pianist’s Bowl recital Wednesday night.

The rest of the agenda--his own transcription of Handel’s “Harmonious Blacksmith” Variations, Mendelssohn’s “Rondo Capriccioso,” Liszt’s Sonata “Apres une lecture de Dante,” four waltzes by Chopin and Ravel’s “Alborada del Gracioso”--closely resembles the program he will play at another birthday celebration, at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 27.

In the meantime--that is, between the Bowl and Carnegie engagements--Wild will open the Cincinnati Symphony season this month with three performances of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, with conductor Jesus Lopez-Cobos; appear Nov. 1 with the American Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, and play another recital Nov. 19 in Chicago.

As he nears 80, he seems to have barely slowed down. “I’m playing less often than I was years ago,” the youthful-sounding Wild acknowledges, “but it’s enough. And steady.”

He is also still teaching, which he says he loves, though he has reservations about academia.

For several years, Wild was an artist in residence at Ohio State University in Columbus, “but the dean decided to put his emphasis on composition, not on performance, and I couldn’t go along with that.” Two years ago, Wild joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He drives there from his home near Columbus and boasts that it is a short drive: “Just three CDs and you’re there.”

Now the pianist’s decade-long sojourn in Ohio may be coming to an end.

“I’m really, seriously thinking about going back to live in New York,” he says, his voice reflecting no small amount of affection for the city. Once again, cement exerts its power.*

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Earl Wild, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. $3-$62. (213) 480-3232.