ANDRÉ WATTS: Won a Philadelphia Orchestra student competition and debuted when he was 10 in a children’s concert in 1957. PHOTO COURTESY OF YOUTUBE.COM

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) – Pianist André Watts, whose televised debut with the New York Philharmonic as a 16-year-old in 1963 launched an international career of more than a half-century, has died. He was 77. Watts died Wednesday at his home in Bloomington of prostate cancer, his manager, Linda Marder, said Friday. Watts joined the faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2004. He said in 2016 that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

“WHAT MR. WATTS HAD THAT WAS EXCEPTIONAL WAS A DELICACY OF ATTACK THAT ALLOWED THE PIANO TO SING.”

Watts won a Philadelphia Orchestra student competition and debuted when he was 10 in a children’s concert on Jan. 12, 1957, performing the first movement of Haydn’s Concerto in D major.

He studied under Genia Robinor and made his New York Philharmonic debut in a Young People’s Concert led by music director

Leonard Bernstein on Jan. 12, 1963, a program televised three days later on CBS.

“Now we come to a young man who is so remarkable that I am tempted to give him a tremendous buildup, but I’d almost rather not so that you might have the same unexpected shock of pleasure and wonderment that I had when I first him play,” Bernstein told the audience. “He was just another in a long procession of pianists who were auditioning for us one afternoon and out he came, a sensitive-faced 16-yearold boy from Philadelphia … who sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped.”

Bernstein conducted Watts and the orchestra in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

“What Mr. Watts had that was exceptional was a delicacy of attack that allowed the piano to sing,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The New York Times.

Watts so impressed Bernstein that the conductor chose him to replace an indisposed Glenn Gould and play the Liszt concerto twice at Philharmonic Hall a few weeks later.

Within months, he had earned a recording contract and became among the most prominent pianists. “When I’m feeling unhappy, going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right,” he said on a 1987 episode of ”Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”