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THE HISTORY OF THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE
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About Tippet Rise
amber-throated piano for Schubert or Brahms. Viennese pianos have wooden rims, and so rarely have the power to cut through an orchestra with the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1. Viennese pianos have rounded tones, so each note of a Mozart or Haydn sonata will glisten. But often
the harmonics, the tonalities won’t mingle, and so the dialogue between the chords is cut short, maing a piano unsuitable for a Rachmaninoff sonata where the sonorities must pile up into a tsunami, a welter of voices.
Occasionally a piano has everything. This is
true of our 2016 New York Steinways, of the Istomin-Horowitz CD-18 Steinway, of Véra,
our Hamburg Steinway, and of Seraphina, our Brahmsian 1897 Steinway. All these pianos are Ds, or concert grand 9-foot Steinways. Each of these pianos has fast, stunning actions, where whatever a pianist dreams comes true a second later on the keyboard. Each has an ideal gamut: that is, the entire range of the keyboard sounds as perfect in every part as a piano can sound: the trebles are intense and biting; the midranges are like tenors or sopranos; the basses are growl- ing, wrapped in vibrating iron bells. But beyond that, each one is different.To describe just
three of them: The Istomin-Horowitz CD-18 has two actions.
The older action has a massive sound, slightly wider keys, and demands enormous muscularity to bring out its waterfalls and chasms. It is like
a Bierstadt painting, with Photoshopped, apoc- alyptic sunsets, immense cataracts spilling over jagged cliffs, boreal forests in which lurk trolls
and centaurs. Thar be dragons. This is Horowitz playing the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, possibly the most gargantuan, complex, explo- sive collection of attacks and crescendi, the most grotesque and crenellated cathedral of sound imaginable. You’d better be ready to sustain your fingers for over an hour of trench warfare, of bomb runs, of octaves unlike anything ever written, of lightning scales, endurance tests of staggered chords where all ten fingers perform at the peak
of human potential for more than an hour. It’s
like Hamlet: you are always on stage, and every word you speak is fireworks. The second action is more human: normal, modern-sized keys, a light- er action. Your fingers can relax a bit, and let the piano itself do the singing. But the beast beneath the hammers is the same: a Kraken emerging from the deep sea, the king of the dragons devastating the land, spikes on every scale. This is a piano to choose when you want to make an entrance, to peal out the great stops of the grand cathedral