[CAUT] Weikert felt; was 80 year old S&S hammers

[Fred Sturm]

On Apr 15, 2009, at 1:49 PM, Delwin D Fandrich wrote:

> Steinway, along with many other pianomakers, knew this "secret" some  
> decades
> back. Most seem to have lost it in these "modern" times in their  
> rush to emulate
> the hard and brassy sound that has now become so prevalent.

	I have a more charitable view of where Steinway is today. I find  
their current production reasonably facile to play, it has good  
clarity and projection, and if well prepped, one can be quite  
expressive on it. My take is that Steinway has concentrated on the  
large concert hall, and on concerto performance, where the piano has  
to fill the 2000 seat hall and project through and over the orchestra.  
That has been their strategy, and they have been successful at it,  
whatever quarrels we may have with some details.
	And of course other makers have tried to compete in this same venue,  
hence the convergence on similar design and execution principles.
	The sad fact is that most pianos are in different venues, and most  
pianos are far too loud and powerful for a living room (or most of the  
other locations they live in, like practice rooms). If you "voice  
down" you end up (often) too muddy. I think there is a lot to learn  
from the 19th century, which was, after all, the century of the piano  
composer - most of the standard rep comes from that period. Brahms  
played a Graf he got from Clara Schumann for much of his life, which  
can give a sense of proportion. What I am thinking of is the whole  
picture: amount of energy in versus sound out; ease of making various  
voices in various registers stand out from one another; degree of  
difference in timbre versus finger technique (how much "effort" to  
make a difference). I think there is a whole world of sound and  
expressiveness out there that earlier pianos had and modern ones  
don't. This doesn't mean modern ones are bad, it just means that they  
are limited to a particular spectrum of sound and performance, and the  
loss is a real shame.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu