How about this one?
Thanks for keeping the game going.
My sick Mac is not joining in, though, so I can’t play the video.
My not at all sick Windows computer can’t play it either.
Strange, it works on my iPad. Here’s another:
And the eternal struggle (at least to my ears) between Boesendorfer and Steinway. I wish many of the great recordings we know were made using a Boesendorfer rather than a Steinway. But again, highly subjective.
We went to a performance by Andras Schiff at the Wigmore Hall in London a few years ago. He was playing Schubert late sonatas and he used a Boesendorfer piano. It sounded fantastic. Some months later we heard Ingrid Fliter play Chopin there, on a Steinway. I like her Chopin, but the sound was comparatively weedy.
We weren’t in exactly the same seats though so that could have been a contributory factor.
Steinway pianos are very much the favourites of just about every great virtuoso, and of course most pianists play on the ‘house’ piano of whichever concert hall they are performing in, and most concert halls have their own Steinway in place.
The great (but highly eccentric) Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli insisted on having his own Steinway (and his own piano tuner) with him for any public performances. Michelangeli liked a particular ‘fast’ and ‘bright’ sound, and his Steinway was so tightly strung that it was in danger of imploding.
A few German and Austrian pianists of the older school used to prefer the Bösendorfer, although I’m not sure if that’s the case any more.
The ‘new kid on the block’ is the Italian Fazioli piano, fearsomely expensive (even for a concert grand) and said to have been redesigned from the ground up. I know that Lazar Berman and Alfred Brendel switched to using them. And I think that it was a brand new Fazioli that some unfortunate stagehands managed to drop (and shatter irretrievably) when attempting to remove it from the stage after a concert a few years ago. (I know that I shouldn’t laugh about this, but I can picture it so clearly in my mind, and it brings me close to tears of laughter every time, including now!)
PS I’ve just seen David’s post, which interloped, and I see his reference to Andras Schiff preferring a Bösendorfer.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it wasn’t brand new, it was Angela Hewitt’s Fazioli which she used to take with her. Some of my greatest musical evenings were listening to Bach on that piano, it was only machinery and not a person, but I still had a tear in my eye when I read about that.
Thank you, Eoin, Angela Hewitt was indeed the unfortunate pianist.
(And I’m still giggling to myself, even though I still know that it’s not funny. It reminds me so much of the Monty Python sketch in which the soloist destroyed his violin AND the violin that he borrowed from the unfortunate orchestra leader. It was a made-up Tchaikovsky piece - Contezana Paduana, or some such nonsense.)
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I think Schiff moved on to a different piano more recently.
I once heard Barenboim playing his own instrument at the Royal Festival Hall. There was a big fuss about it at the time. As I recall, much of the mechanism was made up of Steinway parts as they were available. But I have forgotten the main difference in this instrument, which I think cost nearly £1M to build. It was flown ahead of him to be show concerts and the RFH had a Steinway tuned and ready to go in case something happened to his piano. I don’t remember what he played now and I wasn’t that impressed with how it sounded. But we were in row two, off to the right hand side of the hall. So not ideal seating either to hear the instrument or to watch him playing it (as the piano was in the way). No doubt Google could tell me what he played if I wanted to search for it.
Apparently his nickname (for a time, at least) was Bang Bang.
If you’re not a Kenny G fan (and even if you are) it’s worth taking the time to savour this transcript of an interview with Pat Metheny over 20 years ago.
Here’s a teaser. The famously nice Mr. Metheny, when asked what his view of Kenny G is, takes great care not to seem in any way dismissive or disrespectful until, about seven paragraphs in, he says:
… But, like I said at the top, this relatively benign view was all “until recently”.
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She is now playing a replacement built for her by Fazioli. In fact he built five and Hewitt flew to Venice to try them out. You can hear the one she chose in a beautiful Hyperion recording:
Roger
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Thanks Roger.
I do like ‘Bang Bang’ a lot, and it encapsulates pretty well the dreadful noise that he makes. But ‘Sparky’ has a great back story, which I can smile to myself about each time that I see his smug face smirking at me from a record sleeve (or whatever).
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