You enjoy a first class
music experience.
Over such an extraordinary
career, is there one performance
that stands out in your memory
as particularly special?
WATTS: It’s a difficult question, but I can
certainly say, playing with Bernstein when
I was 16 and doing the Young People’s
Concerts in the fall of 1962. I know that
the big deal was substituting for Gould
in ’63, but when I was playing the Young
People’s Concerts, it was television, it was
the New York Philharmonic, it was
Leonard Bernstein.
How do you feel you have evolved
as a musician over your
decades-long career?
WATTS: Evolution is some version of the
aging process. We learn more, we become
more refined and clever, and the experience of life changes the sharpness of some
emotion and blunts some others. But if
you’re an extroverted performer, that d