After Liszt, progress stopped. Steinway, the new market leader, mopped up its rivals (“we took Chickering out,” one executive told me) and signed up the leading virtuosi as exclusive artists. Steinway’s last significant patent, a process for bending timber within the case, was granted while Liszt was still alive. Almost 80 per cent of today’s pianos are maufactured in China.
Which is (partly) why I returned to Budapest last month to behold one of the wonders of the postmodern age: a piano that stands proudly on its own two feet. Yes, you read that right: two feet, not three. The absence of a third leg, the designers argue, allows greater projection by stopping sound from seeping into the floor.
And there is much else that is counter-intuitive about the new piano. The soundboard — the sheet inside that produces the resonance —is not made of forest wood but of a carbon composite. The keyboard has 90 keys, two more than normal, incorporating an extra-low G and G# that Bartók sometimes uses. Seen from the back of a hall, the instrument resembles an ocean-going yacht crossed with an Italian racing car. If looks could kill, this piano is a danger to society.
It is born out of the frustrations of a Hungarian pianist, Gergely Bogányi. A romantic, happiest in the worlds of Schubert and Schumann, Bogányi inspired inventors and engineers with a Lisztian vision of a piano that would hold the eye as much as the ear. After ten years of trial and error, and with small cash injections from the Hungarian government and the EU, a piano was born: two to be precise — the workshop prototype, and the one that Gergely played last month in the Liszt Academy at the instrument’s concert debut.
I watched it being tuned in an empty hall and later played to a packed audience. The first strike of a middle C told me this was unlike any piano I knew. The contact of key on string is head-on, nothing fuzzy at the edges, no after-burr. There is a much-vaunted “warmth” to the Steinway sound. This is cooler, a trifle analytical, but no less agree-able as the ear adjusts. The pianissimi are delicious as clear broth, the middle dynamics are nutritious and only the heaviest of triple-fortes feels oppressive — not that Schubert or Schumann ever meant to break windows. In modern music, in Ligeti and Kurtág, I suspect it would be perfect.
Gergely is, so far, the only artist of consequence to test the new piano. Tamás Vásáry has given some general words of approval and others will flutter fingers down the keyboard in the months to come. Plans are in motion to manufacture ten more concert instruments. This is not a piano that will change the market any time soon. What it does, however, is rekindle Liszt’s mission to free music from its physical corsets and create both a sound of beauty and an object of desire.
Which is (partly) why I returned to Budapest last month to behold one of the wonders of the postmodern age: a piano that stands proudly on its own two feet. Yes, you read that right: two feet, not three. The absence of a third leg, the designers argue, allows greater projection by stopping sound from seeping into the floor.
And there is much else that is counter-intuitive about the new piano. The soundboard — the sheet inside that produces the resonance —is not made of forest wood but of a carbon composite. The keyboard has 90 keys, two more than normal, incorporating an extra-low G and G# that Bartók sometimes uses. Seen from the back of a hall, the instrument resembles an ocean-going yacht crossed with an Italian racing car. If looks could kill, this piano is a danger to society.
It is born out of the frustrations of a Hungarian pianist, Gergely Bogányi. A romantic, happiest in the worlds of Schubert and Schumann, Bogányi inspired inventors and engineers with a Lisztian vision of a piano that would hold the eye as much as the ear. After ten years of trial and error, and with small cash injections from the Hungarian government and the EU, a piano was born: two to be precise — the workshop prototype, and the one that Gergely played last month in the Liszt Academy at the instrument’s concert debut.
I watched it being tuned in an empty hall and later played to a packed audience. The first strike of a middle C told me this was unlike any piano I knew. The contact of key on string is head-on, nothing fuzzy at the edges, no after-burr. There is a much-vaunted “warmth” to the Steinway sound. This is cooler, a trifle analytical, but no less agree-able as the ear adjusts. The pianissimi are delicious as clear broth, the middle dynamics are nutritious and only the heaviest of triple-fortes feels oppressive — not that Schubert or Schumann ever meant to break windows. In modern music, in Ligeti and Kurtág, I suspect it would be perfect.
Gergely is, so far, the only artist of consequence to test the new piano. Tamás Vásáry has given some general words of approval and others will flutter fingers down the keyboard in the months to come. Plans are in motion to manufacture ten more concert instruments. This is not a piano that will change the market any time soon. What it does, however, is rekindle Liszt’s mission to free music from its physical corsets and create both a sound of beauty and an object of desire.
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