Piano Madness

We are officially obsessed.

We have been babysitting my parents' lovely 1912 Knabe grand piano since we moved into this house.


My mom inherited the piano from her mother who inherited it from her mother --Claire Evelyn Clark who lived here in Provo in a great little house on the corner of 8th North and University (which has been turned into a student rental and desperately needs to be reclaimed and restored).  Taking a piano like this to Hawaii would have spelled its destruction, so this lovely instrument has been waiting for my mom for many, many years.  We knew when we had it moved into our house that we would only have it temporarily.  And we have thoroughly enjoyed it.  We use it for choir practice which we host every week.   Allen and Sarah spend lots of time every day playing together and independently.  I think we've done a good job of enforcing the idea that this is something special -- not a toy, but a privilege to play.  Having a beautiful instrument inspires people.  We've loved it, but knew it was on loan.  Well, my parents returned to their new home in Orem after a year and half in Berlin as missionaries and now they have the time to play and enjoy their piano.  So they want it back.  And we don't begrudge it but will sure miss it.

We'd been planning to add a new big TV to the basement with our tax return money, but decided that we'd rather have a beautiful piano than a beautiful TV.  So Allen and I have set about educating ourselves about pianos.  Who knew there was so much to learn?!?!
There is a great book by Larry Fine called the Piano Book which goes into intricate detail of how a piano works, the history of the piano and of virtually every brand of piano that is or has been available in this country.  It is full of technical details and lots of opinions and rankings and input from piano tuners, salespeople, and technicians on the quality and longevity of the various instruments.  There are also devoted online forums with lots of talk about all things piano.  The biggest thing we learned is that once you get to a certain level of quality, so much of the difference in pianos comes down to personal preference.  And the only real way to know which you like best is to try them all.  So we have been exhausting all of our good babysitting karma with all of the grandparents and nieces in the neighborhood so we could drive to every piano store in the state to try out their pianos.  We have played a whole bunch of pianos in the past two weeks.  (Really, Allen plays and I just listen or record on the awesome recorder Allen got for Christmas).  We've played Yamaha, Steinway, JP Pramberger, Estonia, Schimmel, Fazioli, Weinbach, Boston, Mason & Hamlin, Bösendorfer, Brodman, Kawai, Petrof, Grotrian, Shigeru Kawai, Seiler, Bechstein, Wm. Knabe.  Many of you have probably not even heard the names of many of these pianos.  We've played new pianos and used pianos.  We've watched DVDs about how certain pianos are made.  We've listened to CDs of famous people playing pianos.  It has been pretty much all pianos all the time at our house over the past few weeks.  We quickly decided that though it will involve borrowing (which we despise), we want to buy a really wonderful instrument and not a middling one.   It is worth eating only ramen and taking no vactions for the next ten years to have a piano that we love.  Yes, we have become a little psychotic about this.

For a long time we had a hard time getting out from the long shadow cast by the beautiful, full and rather unique sound of a venerable american piano maker.  We explored used pianos and even considered flying out and hiring a piano technician to inspect one in another state and then moving it here.  There is just a wonderful warmth to the treble of some Steinways that we love -- it may be that we're conditioned to like it because it is the most common piano chosen by performers and concert venues.  They are hugely expensive instruments.  They cost more new in the size we're looking at than we make in an entire year.  And the used ones are not hugely discounted either.  We joked that it would be funny to buy one of these and then submit the reciept to our ward clerk for reimbursement as a choir expense.

I was worried that if we bought anything else, though, Allen might feel like we were settling for something less.  Well on Saturday we had a great piano day.  We went to the last remaining piano dealer on the Wasatch Front that we hadn't visited.  They sell Mason & Hamlin pianos which is another old American brand which before WWI was considered one of Steinways close rivals (along with the Knabe company which made great grandma Clark's piano).  The first piano we tried was really nice, but the second one (theoretically exactly the same -- same model, same size, same matierals, same factory, only a few serial numbers apart) was something special.  It really sang to us.  It was powerful and rich in tone.  It had the warm timbre in the treble and a really impressive bass.  And you don't pay for the name so much so a new one was in the same ballpark as the used S&S.

We went to the Steinway dealer from there and played the used B that had been our favorite and it just kind of rang hollow in comparison.  That was really the first time that it hadn't been the yardstick against which the other pianos were compared.

Even considering buying a new piano (we'd been thinking that a used piano would allow us to get more piano for our budget) made us think again about some of the other pianos we'd played.  So we went to another dealer and played their handcrafted Shigeru Kawai which is a truly gorgeous instrument.  It has a completely different sound and touch from the Mason or Steinway.  Much more subtle and subdued.  Really beautiful and with such an astounding dynamic range.  I heave never heard a paino that could be played accurately at such incredibly soft levels.  They are so committed to the quality of these pianos that one of the 9 master craftsmen who actually built the piano fly out from Japan to spend a full day tuning, voicing and adjusting the piano for each purchaser of a new Shigeru.  In the present economy, it is hard to sell even such a beautiful piano so they offered us an incredible deal.

Now we really want to go back up to Baldassin pianos in SLC and try one of the German pianos that we'd really liked on our first day but kind of written off because they're not available used.  It was also a really wonderful sounding instrument and also in the same price range that the other two are.  We'd played it near the end of that day (we were working up their lines to the best) and so were already tired, but we really think it might require more serious consideration.

It is all very exciting and we feel like we've learned so much about what we like and what makes a piano produce that sound.  It has been fun to spend so much time together without the kids too.  Hopefully we'll continue to narrow and find a piano that we really love in the next month or so.  And then we'll start eating ramen.  For a long time.  So if we invite you dinner, you might want to request that we just have a recital instead =)

Part of why we do this:  our little Sarah is making great progress on the piano.  She recently participated in a solo festival where she performed for a panel of judges.  She got 100/100!  Her teacher says that in her many years participating she has only had a handful of students with perfect scores.  She was invited to play in an honors recital and even won $10 in prize money!  Here she is playing at the honors recital and then playing both  songs from the festival at a recital at her teacher's house

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