Pianos I Have Known
[From the pianist's recently obtained diary. --The Producer]
Pianos are not idealized airbrushed magazine nymphs. Pianos are jangly, hard-breathing behemoths, like ebony mammoths trapped in the tarpits of heat and Haydn. Insistence on the untouched tone proceeding from the beaten string and hammered hammer is an impoverished dream that has led to a false polish where unnatural smoothness of tone is considered the norm, despite the plosive, explosive, propulsive, percussive nature of great music.
Glenn Gould, as always, was a beacon of sanity. Rather than a soft-spoken, well-behaved Steinway, Gould preferred a well-played, broken-down conservatory piano, as it was closer to a young musician's everyday world, although it is my theory that later in life he simply didn't want the intrusion of piano tuners during his very private recording sessions.
The perfect piano detracts from the cubist cataract of half-seen harmonies and unperfected chords, just as mathematics needs to become closer to the disobedient fractals of chaos to predict what really happens.
Only then can you start to tune it. And only after it is in perfect tune can you voice it, that is, file, needle, juice, and shape the hammers until each note sounds the way you want it. And then, you have to work on the una corda pedal, that is, the soft pedal, which moves the entire action over until the hammer only hits one string (in reality, two strings), instead of the usual three. If it so much as brushes the third string, it sounds fuzzy and loses its gentleness, and you have to shape the hammer and adjust the position of the hammer and maybe even the action itself until each note hits just two strings evenly.
Until I turned thirty, I never went anywhere where I couldn't spend at least four hours a day on a piano, 365 days a year. Not that it made things any better. The most satisfying compliment my teacher Huberman ever paid me was, "Adrian, but your mistakes are so musical." Finally, love inveigled me to Sardinia for a becalmed, bleached, sunburnt pianoless summer. When I got home, I burst into loud tears during a performance of La Bohème, while my friend burst into laughter at me, the epitome of the double comic-tragic masks of theater.. I'm a great fan of an emotional audience, myself. But my playing improved, and from then on I felt that ignoring the piano was a service to music in general.
Nevertheless, I have met a great variety of instruments in my travels, all of them nine footers (the smaller ones don't have enough harmonics to do justice to any but the slightest of pieces, and I rarely risk the disaster of playing them, although I do remember a quite nice small Bechstein at the Post Hotel in Klosters where diners sent irate notes to the maitre d'hotel at the temerity of Chopin during hors d'oeuvres, and I was forced to yield my shiny scales to the bland doodlings of an apparently more appropriate dinner musician. I also played at the Centre Chopin in Paris a beautiful, even-actioned Grotrian Steinweg, about seven feet long, which had a special fire and amiability to it. And Pianos Magne in Paris had once a lovely small Steingräber, fast, responsive, and lively).
My first piano was a deep, ringing nine-foot Steinway from the late 1920's, and I regret selling it simply because you needed to lift weights just to press the keys down. I thought it would toughen my fingers to have such a recalcitrant action.
I later learned that a great technician can lighten almost any action, so it would have made sense just to have had my old Steinway worked on, since no modern Steinway has the bell-like clarity of the older Steinways from around 1885 to 1940. I've played a few older concert Mason & Hamlins, Chickerings, and Baldwins, and they also have that patina, an almost Stradivarius veneer to their soundboards and their cases.
A beautiful ringing Bechstein in Kathmandu stands out in my Leporello list of pianos, as the day after I played it the roof collapsed and the Bechstein ended its reign filled with water. Old Bechsteins are fast and brilliant, like Steinways without psychological problems, but more recently their actions are sluggish and their tones muffled.
Bösendorfer Imperials are generally thin-sounding, in my experience. Their expense almost guarantees purchasers who are too rich to know if they are in tune, so no one bothers to tune or prepare them. The one Garrick Ohlsson used for his recent complete Chopin is however wonderful, and sounds like an American Steinway.
Viennese pianos in general, such as Feurichs, Ibachs, and Steinwegs, tend to be more old-fashioned in their tone, unable to stand up against the large, 88-player modern orchestra (one player for every piano key). But there are exceptions. I have played brilliant old Blüthners.
I had a Hamburg Steinway C for three years, but found that its tones, while rounded and Haydnesque, couldn't meld into neurotic harmonics like the more complex New York Steinway D. I had in Paris a 1997 Yamaha Concert Grand which, despite Yamaha's early failures at copying the Steinway D, is a faster, more fluent, yowling monster, although it is made for concert brilliance and has trouble calming down for mere practice. Yamahas have thicker hammer handles (called shanks) in the high register than Steinways, which can make hammer sound dominate the more fragile short string sound in the high notes, so Daniel Magne in Paris shaves the shank. Richter and Gould both played the Yamaha, among other pianos (Gould also loved old Chickerings and Baldwins). Kauai concert grands are getting better and better, and may eventually approach the Yamaha.
The Steinways in Paris are Hamburg Steinways, shallow and superficial, without the depth of the American instruments, but there is generally not a lot of German soul-searching going on among the clever French. I've never had much luck finding good French Pleyels, Erards or Gaveaus.
Santi Falcone built his own design, with lovely inner casework, starting in 1984, which took 700 hours. I never felt the pianos were adequately tuned or prepared, which explained their disappointing sales. The company was sold to Mason & Hamlin, after which the factory had two fires in a row. The Falcone is now only made by special order, as are concert Blüthners and Bechsteins. Falcone lives in Carlisle, Mass, where he owns Dante Confections, which makes chocolates.
The Borgato is an elegant Italian nine-footer which takes some two to three thousand hours to make. They make three or four a year on demand. Radu Lupu, one of the great living pianists, has one in London, but I have never played it.
Horowitz's piano was so unevenly voiced that notes leapt unexpectedly out at you, making every piece a novel experience, with inner melodies suggesting themselves at every turn: a very Romantic kind of voicing, which Glenn Gould also seemed to favor. The bass was so heavily voiced that a fly landing on a key would sound like Horowitz. The treble was "juiced" with lacquer thinner until it was brilliant, even a bit shrill. The action was so light your fingers tended to fly out of control. In other words, you turned into Horowitz. (I once asked a former teacher, Irma Wolpe, how a Horowitz concert went, and she said, "Ach, he vaz dryink to be Chorowitz.")
I played in Paris Arthur Rubinstein's Steinway as it was traveling around with him, the one that Israel had had specially prepared for him, and it was rounded beyond belief, immensely voluptuous. I've heard that Rubinstein's hammers were hardened with shellac, rather than the lacquer thinner Steinway now uses, and that his felts were considerably heavier and thicker at 23 pounds than today's 19- to 20-pound hammer felts. Felts are the soft material padding the hammer which makes the tone based on how much it is shaped, needled, grooved, filed, or aligned flush with the strings.
As large as it is, a nine foot piano can play about four times softer than an upright piano or a smaller grand. It has all the voices, including the most important voice, silence. But not all Steinways are created equal, and the most successful examples are understandably offered to great artists and orchestras.
You have to play many dozens of pianos over many years before a great one presents itself. Even then, some are bright and perfect for Chopin and Liszt, some are iron-laden and Schubertian, some are mellow and singing for Mozart, and some are deep and inner for Beethoven, to pick a few examples.
A pianist is reviewed based on his sound, which is heavily dependent on the piano he chooses, and then on how the technician voices it. A piano that sounds effervescent in Chopin may sound shallow in Bach.
Sometimes it's the hall, not the piano. Richard Goode hated the house Chickering at a Maine festival and flew up a Steinway he loved from Steinert's in Boston, but when it was put in the hall, he ended up playing the Chickering.
I have to tell Franz Mohr's story. Tuning for Horowitz, he "juiced" the felts with lacquer thinner more and more to achieve an increasing brilliance Horowitz felt he needed as he got older, although the piano eventually sounded as if it had thumb tacks driven into the felts, that is, it was too tinny. So, during one of Horowitz's concert hiatuses, Mohr removed the tinny hammers and put on new ones, which he voiced over a year until he felt they were perfect.
He then called up Horowitz and said, "Volodny, you'll never believe it, but a miracle has happened to your piano. Maybe it's because nobody played it for a year, but you have to hear it"
So Horowitz came down to the Steinway basement and played for a minute or so, after which he turned to Mohr: "This is what I've been asking you to do for years, Franz. Now, why can't you do that!"
The two Steinway branches in New York and Hamburg were initially competitive. Germany used hammers, felts, and actions made by Renner. The German felts are very brilliant initially, but get compressed to a tinny sound within months. American hammers get better and better. The German actions were faster and smoother, so many pianists sought out German Steinways. After New York switched to Renner actions around 1990, the New York piano was the equal of the German, with the advantage of deeper-sounding felts.
Ultimately, it's the technician who does the after-market work who deserves credit for what a piano becomes over time. Although every Steinway is made the same way, only a few turn out to be exceptional instruments, as the work is still very individual. You need a master craftsman for every step, and even Steinway has very few left.
Ideally one would like a different piano for every piece, the way golfers have different irons. There should be a piano caddy.
Piano rebuilders are an equally rarefied group. Peter Mohr, son of Horowitz's tuner Franz Mohr, worked for Falcone for a while, then started his own rebuilding company with a few Falcone people.
Faust pianos in Irvington, NY uses Canadian custom strings when they rebuild Steinways. Sara Faust feels the old cast-iron plates, hand-poured in Steinway's own foundry until around 1944, were the secret, along with the soundboards.
During World War II, Steinway wood was impounded to make military gliders; afterwards, they couldn't afford to age the wood for 7 years or so outside, so new boards lack the old lush, Guarneri-type sound. Faust uses Sitka spruce to approximate the old sound, not entirely successfully.