Page 64 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

64
About Tippet Rise
THE HISTORY OF THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE
Two of our pianos date from 1897, shortly after
the invention of the modern Steinway; their sound is like Proust’s madeleine, evoking a relatively more meditative world, where instruments were almost human, walls were burled with Circassian walnut wainscoting, and drawing rooms produced sounds like the inside of a violin, multiple layers of aged wood resonating around the divine ratios of an architecture which still remembered the Par- thenon, where music meant a soirée in a rococo jewelbox specially designed for it. The filigree, the moldings, the niches were not just decorative but today would be called absorbers, diffusors, and reflectors, clever shapes to deflect and augment the many frequencies which have to arrive simulta- neously or variously at the ear in order to move us.
We are also lucky to have on these Brahmsian pianos certain innovations devised by Tali, the great magician of the instrument, which change pianos in significant ways, and which we honor as her secret sauce.
These pianos take you back to the day of four-in- hand carriages, of exotic fogs that hovered around the Thames and the Seine and infused many of
the photos of the day by Atget, Brassai, Man Ray, Marville. They are the sound the world wanted
to savor from before the Industrial Revolution, when there were no loud noises, when a chord by Beethoven was the only cataclysm you were likely to hear in your life, before there were bright lights, or planes constantly in the night sky.
A piano being worked on for us by Tali will be the only 9-foot Chickering capable of combining the feather touch which Liszt prized with the deeper frequencies of modern concert mecha- nisms. It will play scales and arpeggios like the wind, as Chopin intended, but be able to shake the hall with the armageddons of Beethoven. It will allow virtuosic feats performed by Thalberg, Meyerbeer, or Gottschalk to regain their sweep and panache, without sacrificing the cries from the depths which Romantic playing demands. Many musicians who grew up in the 1950s and '60s learned to play on their household Chickering: Stephen Hough, Charles Hamlen, even myself. We knew the easy action, the bite, and the power of the instruments we beat to death.
So Tippet Rise is piano heaven. We have some- thing for everyone. Pianists sometimes switch pianos at intermission, so a Liszt spectacular can morph into a Schubert soirée on the same night. These are just a few of the tens of thousands of voices which pianos acquire as they mature, and we hope our concerts and videos will continue to illustrate the many shapes that music can assume, like light sparkling off a summer pond.
—Peter Halstead