Transcript of André Watts
André Watts: Bernstein is bigger than life. I’m sorry. That’s what he was. He was just in every way bigger than life. So in January of ’63, I did the substitution for Gould. Thursday night concert, Friday afternoon concert. Sunday night recording. And he recorded in one evening Schumann “Genoviva,” Strauss “Don Juan,” Liszt “Les Preludes,” and my piano concerto. That’s a lot of music. And so we recorded the concerto and I think we recorded it, maybe we -- basically I would say probably we played it through twice. And then he came to me and he said, “Look. We want to do from the Marziale to the end,” which is three-quarters of the way through the piece to the end. And he said, “Now, we have all the material we need.” I had no sense of insert one, take one. I didn’t know anything about recording and splicing. I know nothing. He said, “We have all the material we need and you never made the same mistake in the same place. So if you make a mistake, you play a wrong note, don't stop. It'll cost too much money if we stop and start again, and we can't over the time allotted." And so he said, "So whatever you do, once we start, don't stop. No matter what kind of mistake you make, keep going." And of course it was very easy for me to follow directions, especially from him – absolutely -- as Maestro. "I heard you and I will do what you said without question. Without question and without quarrel." So we start, right? And he starts the Marziale two bars into it, he's singing at the top of his lungs, ruining the take. Now, there was no one to impress. There was no audience. The players are not going to be impressed by this show of enthusiasm. He's not interested in impressing. He couldn't help himself. First of all, he was going for something. We were doing it again because he wanted a certain quality, and in order to get that out of himself, he lost himself, and he sang out loud. And then of course a tiny, little, easy expletive came out of his mouth when he realized he'd ruined this thing, and we had to start again.
And for me, this was another kind of blessing, a kind of absolute proof of just force of nature music coming from inside him, and none of that -- hey, there may have been wild exaggerations of everything, but they were purely exaggerations of what was actually real in him. So for me, this was the big thing about Bernstein. Plus, the fact that then I went and I played this same piano concerto, and I mean with really great conductors. As I recall, they were great, and certainly I mean, they were famous, which is not always the same thing. They don't always go together; I understand that. But anyway, these were great conductors. And I play the piece now better than I did then, because I practiced like crazy, and really it's the same piece. I played it sort of okay with Bernstein. But I played it better, and the performance was never as good, and never as magical.
