An Exciting (?) Weekend

[Avery Todd]

   List,

   Just thought I'd share about my weekend. We just finished
the International Piano Festival here at the University of
Houston with artists Abbey Simon (faculty), Misha & Cipa
Dichter (New York) and Ursula Oppens (Northwestern University
faculty). Concerts went great and everyone seemed to really
enjoy them.
   The fun began last Monday when Abbey's Baldwin was flown
in from New York (Baldwin Artist). A freight company picked it
up at the airport here and brought it to the university, then
my regular movers came to take it out of the road case and set
it up.
   We found the fallboard off both its "hooks" and the key slip
also off the cheek blocks. Also, I found that the keys of app.
the top two octaves or so, were off their front rail pins and
shifted to the bass end. Of course, I couldn't remove the action
because of a bunch of hammers being up in the air.
   When I got that corrected and tried to remove the action, it
was wedged somehow and refused to come out. Underneath the piano,
I found that the soft pedal lever that actually shifts the
keyboard was wedged up tight somehow. When I pulled on it,
something sort of "clunked" and then the action could be removed.
   I saw that the key strip on top of the keys behind the fallboard
was broken, which is why the keys were out of position, I'm sure.
I glued it back as good as possible (some wood was missing around
the screw hole), called Baldwin C & A in New York and told Danny
about the problems and suggested he have the factory send me a
new key strip, which was done.
   Because of the types of problems, his belief was that the piano
had taken a fall somewhere along the line. After examining the road
case, I totally agree. It's built from a very hard neoprene material
of some kind, with metal banding around all the edges and across the
long sides and on wheels. It had very probably fallen over flat with
the piano in it, up side down. There was obvious damage to the case,
with the metal edging pried up/bent in a couple of places and scrape
marks along the black sides of the case, as if a fork lift had been
used to pick the case back up.
   Then early Saturday morning, I went into the hall and discovered
that the heating had gone off overnight and it was then 63 F. in
the hall. The Dichters even had to practice that morning in that
cold. The physical plant called in a technician and they were
finally able to correct the problem. Then it eventually got up to
around 75 F., which was "too" much! I called again and they managed
to regulate the temp. some more. But it sure caused havoc with the
tunings. They both went fairly flat, so I had to basically do pitch
raise type of tunings to try and settle them down. Really fun when
you only have 3 hrs. to tune two pianos together. This is one
particular time when I was really glad to have the SAT III.
   Then on Sunday, I had to tune completely aurally for the final
concert because my SAT locked up somehow and refused to come back
on. But that's another story. It was good for me to tune aurally,
anyway.
   Ah, the life of a "concert" technician (whatever that is). :-)

Avery
______________________________________

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Avery Todd, RPT
Moores School of Music
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-4201
713-743-3226