Wild about Earl.

LAST month, Earl Wild celebrated his 90th birthday, with a recital in Carnegie Hall. Who's Earl Wild? He is one of the outstanding piano virtuosos of the 20th century. A lanky Pittsburgher, with huge hands, Wild has a monster technique, capable of anything. He has always played the hardest music, the showiest music--but he is more than a technician. Wild has an interesting musical head. He is a throwback to an earlier time of unabashed Romanticism, and barnstorming pianism.

Born two years before America entered the First War, Wild studied with one of the great piano pedagogues of the age, Egon Petri, who in turn had been a student of Busoni. To review Wild's biography is to touch history. He played with Mischa Elman, a violinist who now seems almost as distant as Paganini. He played in the NBC Orchestra under Toscanini. He pioneered Gershwin, that whippersnapper from Tin Pan Alley. He worked on television with Sid Caesar. Some people, with a wrong idea of sophistication, have sniffed at Wild, for this varied background (not to mention his old-fashioned repertoire). Wild has let them sniff: He has had a fun and fulfilling career.

That career has included composing, because, when Wild was young, there was no great division between composer and performer: They were often the same person. He has specialized in transcriptions--in arrangements for the piano--like so many other virtuosos of his kind. Among those transcriptions is an album of Gershwin songs. A friend of mine recently remarked to Wild, "I'm going to learn your 'Liza.'" He responded, "It's hard, you know." Indeed.

Five years ago, I attended, and reviewed, Wild's 85th-birthday recital, also in Carnegie Hall. One had to make few allowances, if any. I reviewed him essentially straight, as I would a pianist of 45, say. A reader--a woman from Ohio, I think--wrote me an angry letter, saying, "How can you say those critical things about this great and venerable musician?" I replied that I was paying him the compliment of regarding him as I always had: He was himself.

And he has continued to be himself. Forget the recordings--there have been several recent ones--because they can be deceptive. (Recording engineers have more tricks than fashion photographers.) What about live performances? Two years ago, Wild traveled to Carnegie Hall to play in the memorial service for Harold C. Schonberg, the longtime critic of the New York Times. Schonberg loved pianists--particularly Romantic virtuosos like Wild--and, in fact, wrote a classic book called The Great Pianists. At the memorial service, Wild played a Liszt ballade, and played it well, as always.

Music history is replete with masterly older pianists. Artur Rubinstein played inspiringly in his 80s and 90s, enjoying what someone dubbed his "Indian summer." Shura Cherkassky had a kind of renaissance in his 80s, or at least a new fame. Mieczyslaw Horszowski was concertizing--and well--at almost 100. And among non-pianists, we could cite the cellist Pablo Casals, a force in his 90s, and the guitarist Andres Segovia (ditto). Leopold Stokowski, the conductor, is a special case: He conducted compellingly right up to his death at 95.

And Earl Wild is not the only musician to have celebrated his 90th birthday at Carnegie Hall recently. A week after Wild appeared, the hall staged a 90th-birthday concert for the composer George Perle. And he is practically a pup compared to Elliott Carter, born in 1908, who has been seen in Carnegie Hall and elsewhere a lot this season. Taking the cake, however, is Leo Ornstein, the visionary composer who lived from 1892 to 2002. (Digest those numbers for a minute.) At the Wild recital, the music scholar David Dubal remarked to me that Ornstein is the only composer to have worked in three different centuries.

Tuck that into your cocktail-party repertoire.

Arriving at Carnegie Hall last month, Wild was not in his best shape physically. He had had a heart operation, among others, and his vision was poor. But he looked essentially as he always has, so tall, so erect, so elegant, with that shock of white hair. I asked a member of his management team something embarrassingly gossipy: "Is that a toupee?" No, that's Wild's hair, every follicle, and there are tons of them.

He does not play old man's recitals, this pianist: not gentle Schumann pieces, or Chopin mazurkas, or the Ravel Pavane. His recitals are still Wildean. He began with something relatively calm, however, a recent transcription of his: an Adagio by Marcello (of the Italian Baroque). In this piece, Wild was beautifully in balance, demonstrating a singing tone and bringing out all voices. He played freely--with ample pedal, for example--but not without taste. He suffered a slight memory lapse--he had had some in his 85th-birthday recital, too--but quickly recovered from it. Arelaxed, almost nonchalant man, he has never been one to sweat the small stuff.

After Marcello came Beethoven: his Sonata in D major, Op. 10, No. 3. This is a difficult work, sometimes fiendishly so. Wild was not a model of Beethoven playing here, but he exhibited a certain command, and he gave the final movement--the Rondo--notable character.

Then--you must have this in a Wild recital--Liszt. And not introspective, technically undemanding Liszt, either, but the Jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este. With those relaxed arms, sweeping over the keyboard, Wild produced sparkling effects. I had the thought that, not long before, I'd heard the Hungarian pianist Zoltan Kocsis--now in his prime--play this same work. Was he better than Wild? Sure, but not by much, I tell you, not by much.

The recitalist then turned to Chopin, his G-minor Ballade, and as he played, I had another thought: The objections I had to this performance were those I had always had to Wild's playing. (Briefly, I find him a little blunt.) My objections had nothing to do with age, with a decline either technical or interpretive.

And there was a lot to admire in Wild's playing of the Ballade, as there was in his playing of subsequent Chopin works. One of them was the Scherzo in B-flat minor. Wild does not play with the same fire or force he once did, but he compensates for it in what you might call poetry. The Scherzo didn't sound much like a scherzo, frankly--it sounded more like a nocturne. But you have never heard it so beautiful! You perhaps never knew there was such beauty in it. An autumnal, ruminative Scherzo in B-flat minor? Turns out it's possible.

Wild also played Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu (from which we get the pop song "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows"). In these hands, it was amazingly nimble, gossamer.

To end the printed program we had another recent Wild transcription--this one a flashy one (none of this stately Baroque stuff). The piece? The Mexican Hat Dance. I kid you not. Wild put on a circus act, dazzling, irresistible. Toward the beginning, he had a little lapse, didn't care, and started over again--finishing superbly.

As the audience stood and applauded, something a bit strange occurred: The soprano Aprile Millo--another old-fashioned musician, as it happens--appeared on the stage, with the composer Ned Rorem (spry and randy at 82). Millo gave a little talk, in her grand-diva way, commenting that Wild has "the ocean in his hands" (which is true). It seemed that she would sing "Happy Birthday"--but, sadly, she merely started the audience in it, while Rorem played the piano.

And then Wild gave a single encore: not another dazzler, but a piece dazzling in a different way: Respighi's Notturno. This was dreamy, beguiling, almost impossibly lovely. Who would ever have thought that Earl Wild--thunderer of the piano, heir to the Liszt tradition, to the Busoni tradition--would end his career as an exquisite colorist?

But I should not be so quick to say he is ending his career. I wouldn't be surprised to cover his 95th-birthday recital, in November 2010. Many people have said that he's the last of a line, the last of a breed--"the last Romantic." But people are always saying that, about this one or that one. If you counted up the Last Romantics in recent decades, you might reach 20. There was even a Horowitz documentary of that title: The Last Romantic. Right now, I could name you ten young pianists who are virtuoso Romantics (most of them from Russia, to be sure--mother of that breed). But Wild is something special, an American original, and when he is gone, why ...

But there will be many, many recordings. He made his first recording in 1934. He made his most recent last year--i.e., 70 years later.

Pretty good.