Grand strategy

Spectator, The, Mar 31, 2001 by Williams, Roddy

NOT long ago, a small (and unexpected) injection of cash enabled me to realise a lifelong ambition: to get rid of my Kawai piano and purchase a decent grand. The Kawai had been the bane of my life for more than 20 years. Its impossibly heavy touch and cruel metallic tone had blighted my career as a pianist (which went no higher than grade eight) and condemned me and my family to a sonic gulag. Now at last, in the shape of a Bluthner, perhaps, or even a Steinway, I could afford the pianistic equivalent of steroids. Little did I realise, as I embarked on a tour of London's piano showrooms, that I was about to succumb to one of the most unusual and expensive of all consumer addictions: pianophilia.

If you are lucky enough to have inherited one of the instruments mentioned above, you may not realise how fearfully expensive they are today. A decent-sized Bluthner or Bosendorfer grand will set you back about L40,000; a Steinway or Fazioli even more. Why pay a small fortune, when musically-challenged families are casting off these wonderful names for just two or three thousand?

With this thought in mind, I headed for the Phillips piano auction in Bayswater. Like a vast knacker's yard, where the relics of a once great musical culture sell for a pittance, the Phillips was a revelation. To enter the showroom and behold the cornucopia of wonderful names on offer Broadwood, Pleyel, Grotrian Steinweg, Shiedmayer, Erard - with their fruitwood veneers and fabulous marquetry, is to gaze upon a glorious era of craftsmanship, when piano ownership was the sine qua non of civilised life and pianists were regarded as a kind of spiritual aristocracy. In 1900 there were 200 piano-makers in Camden Town alone; today, there is only one left in the whole country.

If the sight of these venerable instruments filled me with wonder, how can I describe their prospective owners? Consider the appearance of our most distinguished pianists: Alfred Brendel; Mitsuko Uchida; Christian Zimmerman. Noble, sensitive, intelligent, these - you will surely agree - are some of the finest-- looking specimens of humanity. At the Phillips piano auction you mingle with their poor relations: frowsty scholars with moth-eaten jerseys and unkempt hair; poor-as-church-mice piano teachers, hunchbacked with humility; waspish piano-- collectors, increasing their vast hoards. Somewhat laissez-faire in their approach to personal hygiene they may have been, but, like their more eminent cousins, they were aglow with spiritual beauty. I was honoured to find myself among them.

The Phillips is not, however, without its drawbacks. A hellish cacophony fills the room as dozens of pianos are played simultaneously. Many of them are, in purely musical terms, little more than junk. I looked on speechless as a bullish pinstripe, proudly accompanying his 'infant-- prodigy' daughter, bid more than L4,000 for an instrument with a cracked frame (worth a few hundred at most). Mercifully, I had hired a technician to scope out such flaws, and so acquired a superbly preserved seven-foot Bechstein for the bargain price of L5,400

Needless to say, the wondrous qualities of this instrument, with its gorgeous zinging tone (the acoustic equivalent of ripe cheese or vintage Burgundy), filled me with joy. But something had happened to me at the Phillips. However hard I struggled to suppress it, a simple thought had wormed its way into my mind and refused to go away: why have one piano when you can have two? And in this grossly extravagant and bigamous frame of mind I embarked on another tour of the piano showrooms.

The world of modern-day piano-manufacturing reveals some intriguing parallels with the automobile industry. The bottom of the market is dominated by Korea, where for about L7,000 we find instruments such as the Young Chang - the Hyundai of pianos - and Weber. (Don't be fooled by German names, by the way: Strauss is made in China; the once glorious Ibach is now owned by Daewoo.) At around L12,000 we reach the pianistic equivalent of Nissan and Honda, in the form of Kawai and Yamaha. Just as the Japanese automobile industry no longer turns out the bangers for which it was once notorious, Japanese pianos today are well designed and engineered with impressive levels of quality-control. They remain, however, soulless copies of German designs. Britain and France once boasted a fine tradition of piano-manufacturing; sadly, Broadwood long ago went the way of Triumph and Morris, and the esteemed French Pleyel survives only in name.

Undoubtedly, the finest pianos in the world are made in Germany and Italy. Perhaps the most interesting and original is the Italian Fazioli - definitely a contender for anyone with a bonus to blow and a taste for oneupmanship. These superb instruments, built in tiny numbers under the watchful eye of Paolo Fazioli, possess a gorgeously clear, rich sound and all the Italian flair for design one associates with Alfa Romeo or Lamborghini. Like these distinguished marques, they are also rumoured to be - how shall we say? - high-maintenance. But it is Grosser Deutschland (if we include Austria) that still boasts - as it always has done the highest number of fine piano-manufacturers to be found anywhere in the world: Bluthner, Bechstein, Bosendorfer, Sauter, Steingraeber, Steinway.