After having done all of this recording and having played many pieces from pre-baroque to modern, I think I’m a position to be able to comment, at least from my perspective, on the ‘performance’ of the piano and its ‘suitability’ for various type of music.
I haven’t found any issues at all. I can get the sounds I want and the interpretation I want without any effort now and the piano has proved itself to be able to handle (at least at my level) any style, speed or dynamic range I throw at it.
A somewhat amusing but entirely logical result of many of my recordings is that the piano’s sustain is such that my final chords seem to take an eternity to disappear into the darkness of silence. The bass notes on my piano have a forty second sustain time so it is possible to have a one minute piece and (at least) a twenty second (say) final chord – and this comes out very cleanly on the recording. In practice what I have done in a majority of cases is to get to the stage where the decaying sound is beginning to show signs of being affected by the background noise and then fade it out.
As I have noted previously, the piano’s dynamic range is such that I can easily outdo the dynamic range of the CD. In practice, I didn’t have too much trouble with this since even when the volume meters began to get clipped the sound is still very clean and not distorted in any way. The soft parts are still quite audible and hopefully when people play it back they will able to hear everything, but I suspect the better the speakers the better.
Finally, the clarity of the piano itself comes out very well overall. The real tests of a piano in my view are the high treble and the bass, and in both cases the sounds come out remarkably well. Even when there are a great range of sounds, the bass and the treble are clearly delineated and very clear, and the bass does not interfere either in terms of volume or frequency masking in any way.
The recordings show quite clearly that the ‘hype’ surrounding these pianos is not just ‘hype’. I couldn’t do on any other make of piano what I’ve done here – there really is a different world of sound to be explored and experienced. These pianos are not for the faint hearted as I’ve said many times and you need to have a good deal of musical sensitivity and aural perception to appreciate what these pianos can do, but from all of this there is one point that becomes very clear.
If I can do all of this with my limited abilities, imagine what others of greater ability (and there are many) can do. There is no reason any more to stick with tradition. One has to progress. Piano music has progressed far past the 19th century piano designs. This is the only piano I’ve played that can do justice to any kind or period of music.
