Christopher Moore's Personal Blog

… for something to come together in a really satisfying way, but that is what happened yesterday at the Stuart & Sons factory in Newcastle where, for the first time, I was able to hear a very competent and mature pianist get sounds out of a Stuart piano that, as well as other people including myself, a very experienced and well equipped recording engineer told me he’d never either heard before or ever imagined a piano could produce.

Wayne, of course, has been in the piano business all of his life and has spent the majority of it designing and building pianos. Margaret Lemoh, like all dedicated mothers, has spent many years raising children, in this case by the name of Tonya.

After all of that effort (!) we had the unique experience of a sensitive and mature artist bringing the best out of a sensitive and mature piano in a programme which did not include Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart etc etc, but nonetheless was a very well chosen and balanced programme including the music of:

• Margaret Sutherland
• Miriam Hyde
• Claude Debussy
• Joseph Marx
• Elena Kats-Chernin
• Alberto Ginastera
• Johannes Brahms

… and each piece was selected to really show how in the hands of a competent pianist the music can be enhanced by the extra capabilities of the Stuart piano. I doubt that, in particular, the Kats-Chernin (Variations on a Serious Black Dress, which incidentally she played from a hand-written score by the composer) has received a better performance – it brought the house down and for a piece of ‘modern’ classical music that is an achievement in itself. As a side note, Tonya recorded it again after the audience had gone but unfortunately one of the pages turned out to be upside down and when turned to, chaos ensued. A more cynical person than me would have said it didn’t make any difference…

But of course it did – and it was a marvelous exposé of how to use the entire range of the piano to bring out the resonance, harmonics and overall vertical quality of the instrument – and in that it succeeded brilliantly. There is no doubt that this will be the definitive recording of this piece – it could not, repeat not, be played nearly as effectively on any other make of piano now matter what the quality of that piano. This is what makes the Stuart piano unique, and for the audience yesterday, the experience was unique.

At the end I gave an all too brief (in my view, I could have covered much more) introduction to the piano and its features and related all of that to what Tonya had just performed. It was well received (I am quite a fluent public speaker and I know the piano well now of course), and I think everyone went away with a much better view of what the piano can do and what it means to music overall. That was why I viewed this whole event as being very important and it succeeded in what I knew it could achieve.

Now we have to continue the process. A few ideas for next year are beginning to take shape – even though the shapes are somewhat amoeba-like at the moment and need much more thought.

The recording of this event should be very high quality both in terms of performance and sound. It was a great event, at all levels and we all learnt a great deal. Even though I didn’t get home until 11.30pm after a two and a half hour drive (fortunately mainly on the freeway – cruise control is very, very useful) it was well worth it.

Now when can we do it again?