"I didn't just become a pianist. I was born a pianist," says Earl Wild by telephone from his home in Columbus, Ohio, where he lives with his longtime partner and record producer, Michael Rolland Davis. Just named "Instrumentalist of the Year" by Musical America magazine, Mr. Wild is often referred to as "the Last Romantic," because he has long been a major exponent of such composers as Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Liszt, and because his formidable virtuosity evokes their sweeping keyboard manner. On Saturday, the ebullient Mr. Wild turned 90, and tonight at 8 p.m. he celebrates this landmark birthday at Carnegie Hall with a program of Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin and his own inventive piano transcriptions that show that his technique and musicianship are still as keenly honed as his celebrated wit.

In today's youth-worshipping society, older classical musicians tend to enjoy particular reverence not always accorded veterans in other fields. First, they offer the wisdom of their experience. Second, they represent a tangible link with something we like to consider a living musical tradition. Mr. Wild knew and worked with such historic icons as Arturo Toscanini, Leopold Stokowski, Otto Klemperer, and the Polish virtuoso Jan Paderewski, who also served as Poland's prime minister between the world wars.

His own affinity for the piano, and his perfect pitch, emerged early on. As a child in Pittsburgh, Mr. Wild zeroed in on his parents' Edison phonograph. "The first record I learned was the overture to Bellini's opera, 'Norma,'" he recalls. "It started with a G-minor chord. And when I was about three, I was able to reach up to the keyboard of our upright piano and play along in the same key."

Fluently sight-reading at the keyboard at six, he was enrolled in a program for artistic children at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). By his college graduation, in 1937, he was already a seasoned concert artist, having been regularly playing piano and celeste in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra since he was 14. Following his 1927 radio debut, in Pittsburgh, the 12-year-old was invited to become the station's staff pianist, which led to a subsequent position as staff pianist of Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1944.

In 1939, Toscanini invited Mr. Wild to be the soloist in an NBC Symphony broadcast of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Mr. Wild had never played Gershwin before, but after the broadcast he was identified as a major Gershwin interpreter. Since then he has not only played and recorded Gershwin, but composed his own Gershwin transcriptions, among them his concert "Fantasy on 'Porgy and Bess'"(1976) and "Virtuoso Etudes on Seven Gershwin Songs" (1973).

Mr. Wild's transcriptions -- essentially highly inventive piano arrangements -- evolved out of his love of improvisation, which he regrets is a lost art today. "Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt were all famous for improvising," he notes, lamenting that 20th-century teaching practice generally dismissed the skill. "True improvisation frees your musical imagination," he says, "and one of my teachers, Egon Petri, was a genius at it -- at one of our lessons he improvised a piece using the Immolation scene from Wagner's "Gotterdammerung" and "Roll Out the Barrel" as a countermelody. It sounded as though Wagner had written every note."

Mr. Wild has composed throughout his career, including incidental music for an Off-Broadway play; an Easter oratorio; and a piano sonata from 2000 whose third movement is titled "Toccata a la Ricky Martin." Noting that he has never met Mr. Martin, he says the subtle Latin beat beneath the devilish passagework was not inspired by a particular Martin song, but by "the sheer happiness I heard when I turned on the radio one day, and heard this boy indulging in this rhythmical music. I never forgot that happiness."

Indeed, Mr. Wild has never been a snob. Apart from composing notably sophisticated operatic parodies for TV star Sid Caesar's "Caesar's Hour" during the 1950s, his own works include Lisztian "Reminiscences" on themes from Disney's film classic "Snow White," "Doo-Dah Variations" based on a Stephen Foster theme, and a dazzling arrangement of the "Mexican Hat Dance." This last will be on tonight's Carnegie Hall program, and in it Mr. Wild embellishes and develops the familiar dance tune with musicianship and inventiveness worthy of Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

Mr. Wild included the "Mexican Hat Dance" on a recital disc he made at age 88 for Ivory Classics, capping a splendid program that contrasts his idiomatic early Mozart style (Sonata K. 332) with his full-blooded approach to the Sonata No. 1 by the influential Russian nationalist Mily Balakirev. Mr. Wild included his own sonata on an Ivory CD of 20th-century piano sonatas by Stravinsky, Barber and Hindemith, which shows how thoroughly modern the "Last Romantic" can be. His latest Ivory CD, "Living History," features performances of Bach, Scriabin, Franck, and Schumann. And one can compare the playing on these recordings with the performances on "Earl Wild at 30: Live Radio Broadcasts from the 1940s" (Ivory). (These and other Wild recordings are available in shops or can be ordered directly from www.IvoryClassics.com, his and Mr. Davis's own independent label.)

Mr. Wild observes: "When I was younger I always played well technically, but some things I did were rather cool. As I grew older, however, my playing warmed up emotionally." He says that phrasing in piano is very much like singing. "I love playing songs on the piano because it brings out the poignant shaping of every phrase and climax. Very few people understand where the climax is -- in anything." Mr. Wild's love of song inspired him to make a series of beautiful transcriptions of Rachmaninoff songs, which he has also recorded.

In recent years, Mr. Wild has been increasingly concerned with the comparative aural qualities of different keys. He says that he has always felt that certain Beethoven sonatas were written in a key too high, noting that today's concert pitch is much higher than Beethoven's was. "I discovered that I am able to play Beethoven sonatas in any key, and in concert I'll often play a sonata one or two steps lower than it's written, because it sounds better to me that way." Mr. Wild acknowledges that transposing like this, often on the spur of the moment, "is a wonderful exercise, because it calls on all your reserves of skill and flexibility." He declares that if more pianists did it, a lot of performances would sound more spontaneous. Nonetheless, he admits that "every so often I play something and realize that I've begun in the wrong key. It makes me crazy. But it keeps me on my toes."