If you've ever heard Claire Chevalier or Jos van Immerseel play French music on their sparkling, perfectly restored ca. 1900 Erard grands, you might agree that Ravel and Debussy sound fabulous and entirely fresh compared to what we're used to in this country. Brahms on a warm-toned Bechstein or Bluethner of his period also takes on a distinctive character. Old Chickerings and Knabes were lovely for chamber music and vocal accompaniment, I guess partly because their overtones aren't so out of tune as they are in brilliant, edgy modern grands with super-hard hammers. But just as important as fitting the piano to the music is fitting it to the room acoustics, and personally I prefer a S&S B to a D in many situations. I also find the sound of a D incongruous for honky-tonk, ragtime, etc., but it's a matter of personal taste. As very old men, both Eubie Blake and Mieczyslaw Horszowski told me they missed the variety of piano tone they'd enjoyed before World War Two. We have little idea today of how varied and exciting piano tone used to be before it got homogenized. Of course they played whatever pianos they were confronted with, but Horszowski in particular had preferences depending on the repertoire, and had a strong interest in historical pianos. Laurence ----- Original Message ----- From: JONATHLANGH at cs.com To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Friday, March 05, 2010 7:50 AM Subject: [CAUT] Piano Preferences I am scheduled to give a talk on the types and brands of pianos suited to particular kinds of music, such as jazz, List, Beethoven, accompanying the voice. Do you fellows have opinions or knowledge of what pianos might be appropriate for certain music? Jonathan Langham, RPT -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100305/69910db4/attachment.htm>
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