“People expect me to play virtuoso pieces and amusing pieces,” said Earl Wild, who has been gratifying such expectations for more than 70 years. His own technically daunting transcription of “Mexican Hat Dance,” a Wild specialty that easily embraces both types of pieces, will conclude the 90thbirthday concert he is giving tomorrow at Carnegie Hall. The program opens less showily, with his transcription of a piece by Alessandro Marcello. In between come works by Beethoven, Liszt, and Chopin.

Last year it appeared a 90th-birthday concert might not be in the offing, for Mr. Wild had quadruple-bypass surgery as well as operations for an artery and for cataracts. “As soon as I could, I staggered back to the piano,” said Mr. Wild, one of the last of the great Romantic piano virtuosos. “The piano is my life, and I wasn’t going to give it up. If I get up in the morning and feel lousy, I play. At first, nothing seemed to work, but little by little it came back.”

Mr. Wild returned to the New York concert stage in July for a recital at the Mannes College of Music’s International Keyboard Institute and Festival. A few days later we spoke on the Upper West Side. He looked characteristically stylish in a sports coat and tie, his full head of white hair neatly groomed. He was gracious, almost courtly in demeanor, and radiated a mellow glow. He loves a good story and a good laugh.

For nearly 30 years, starting in the late 1930s, Mr. Wild was on the staff at NBC, doing everything from performing with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony to playing and writing music for Sid Caesar’s classic television show. “One of the first things I did with Toscanini was orchestral pieces from Albeniz’s ‘Iberia.’ I played the celeste and had practically nothing to do – plunk here, plunk there – but my part had no cues and I missed an entrance.

“‘Celeste, you sleep!’ he exclaimed. But we got along fine after that. He was so accurate, very correct. Tempos for singers could be too fast, but when he used rubato, it was for a reason.”

In 1942 Toscanini chose Mr. Wild to be the piano soloist for a broadcast of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Thanks to Toscanini’s influence, Mr. Wild spent the rest of the war years in Washington playing flute in the Navy band. “Sad to say, Washington was just a big cocktail party while everyone else was off fighting the war. Mrs. Morgenthau, the wife of the treasury secretary, told the Roosevelts about me. President Roosevelt loved to watch fingers flying, so I was the man for him.”

Mr. Wild played for six presidents, from Hoover to Johnson. “Roosevelt was the most vibrant one – you would have liked him.”

NBC highly prized Mr. Wild’s improvisatory skills, a gift he demonstrated as a child in Pittsburgh. “I started playing the piano when I was 3. We had lots of records at home, and I tried to imitate them. When I was 8, I improvised a piece in the style of Ravel.” He recalls later impressing the pianist Egon Petri with an improvisation. “He was good at it, too – he improvised a piece combining ‘Roll out the barrel’ and themes from ‘Gotterdammerung.’ It was very Wagnerian!”

Mr. Wild also delights in playing pieces in different keys. “I depend on my ear for this. The ear is always reliable, at least mine is. Fast passages are the only real problem. Sometimes if you take a piece like the Chopin Etude in D down a third, it has a whole new beauty.” He avers that in Carnegie Hall he will play everything in the original key.

Mr. Wild left NBC in the late 1960s, when “everything went to Hollywood.” Teaching followed at places like Penn State, Juilliard, Carnegie Mellon, and Ohio State. Since 1995 he has lived in Columbus, Ohio, with his companion Michael Rolland Davis. “I had been traveling all over, giving concerts by myself – it was a fate worse than death, so I invited Michael to come along.”

In the mid-1990s, after frustrations with major record companies, the two established Ivory Classics. Mr. Wild had licensed to Sony a recording of virtuoso piano transcriptions – making transcriptions remains a strong interest of his – which won a Grammy. Peter Gelb (then president of Sony Classical, now incoming general manager of the Metropolitan Opera) sent him a bottle of champagne and his congratulations.

“But they never put a Grammy sticker on the disc, and when I offered to do another record for them, they said ‘no.’ Isn’t it heaven?” He took the transcriptions disc back, and Ivory Classics reissued it. The label, which Mr. Davis runs, has issued more than 50 records, half of them by Mr. Wild.

Earlier records are too numerous to keep track of. “I recorded all four of the Rachmaninoff concertos and the Paganini Variations in just one week,” he recalled. “Now people take weeks to do them and end up with a crazy quilt.” His latest disc, “Living History,” shows why the hoopla about Mr. Wild’s pianistic wizardry shouldn’t overshadow his considerable interpretive skills.

It opens with playing that is almost the antithesis of showmanship: a fluent, serene account of Bach’s Partita in B flat. “I add a little decoration to the partitas, not much.” He brings out the spirituality of Franck’s “Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue” – “this music comes close to religion” – and imparts both dreamy lyricism and stormy impetuosity to Schumann’s “Fantasiestucke,” Op. 12. Also included is an arresting performance of Scriabin’s innovative Fourth Sonata.

“People think of me as a technician,” he acknowledged. Does that bother him? “Oh no,” he said, and laughed as if it were the furthest thing from his mind. “Maybe they’re jealous! But I don’t care what people think. I’m too old for that!”

Mr.Wild will perform November 29 at the Isaac Stern Auditorium (Carnegie Hall, 881 Seventh Avenue, at 57th Street, 212-247-7800).