Page 67 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

The great technician for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Tali Mahanor, gives the Lincoln Center pianos names. They are always women’s names: Chantal, Darcelle, Nola, Dorabella.
The 1897 Steinway D she restored for us is called Seraphina. Its baby cousin B from 1897 is Beatrice (after Dante’s love). The Istomin-Horowitz CD-18 was once called Kira. We call the new Hamburg Steinway Véra, after the great Véra Nabokov, without whom her husband Vladimir would never have had the time or space to write.
When my teacher Russell Sherman and I flew to Berlin to choose the number-two piano at the Berlin Philharmonic for the recording we were making of the Beethoven Concerti with Václav Neumann and the Czech Philharmonic, Sherman called the piano Lola Montez. It was sultry, silky, but also treacherous, slippery, insidious.
Pianos have intrinsic natures, deep in their
bones. It isn’t just the voicing of the felts on the hammers, or the way the touch is regulated by the technician. It’s a natural voice they’re born with, something deep inside the iron plate, or buried
in the seventeen layers of the bent-wood rim, or caught up by the metal bell suspended beneath the soundboard. Each soundboard is also differ- ent, and when boards die after many decades, the new board will bring a new identity into being. Each piano is made exactly the same way with the same parts by the same craftsmen in the same factory in either Hamburg or Queens, and yet one piano will be dull and meandering, and another will be powerful and focused, while a third will be dreamy and poetic.
Pianists are often judged by their pianos, whose sound they can nuance, but whose nature is beyond their control. So pianists will try to choose a brilliant piano if they are playing Liszt, a pro- found piano for Beethoven, or a singing,
2018 Summer Season 67